My Heart Needs To Get Out Of My Throat.

I was actually in the middle of writing a completely different post when this happened. As I’ve mentioned I’ve been doing a lot of lowsec hauling runs lately and I was picking up my first lowsec run of the day while writing a post (It’ll be out tomorrow). I’d done my usual homework on the route I’d be taking and all the jumps had been quiet for the last hour at least.

I went on over to the pick up station to grab the contract while blogging on my second monitor. I accepted the contract and took a peek at what I was delivering. I always do this just incase it’s something that sets my alarm bells ringing, but it just looked like someone was willing to pay over the odds to get their Gas Command Centers delivered into lowsec.

The delivery station was 5 jumps into lowsec and as I came up on the first of these jumps I put aside my blogging to give my full attention to the remainder of the trip. And it was a good thing that I did. This 4 man gate camp was waiting for me just on the other side. Apparently they had managed to set up and kill 3 ships in the short time it took me to grab the contract.

When I started playing Eve I never thought that such a slow-paced game could provide me much of an adrenalin rush. Well running my first gatecamp in an industrial sure proved me wrong. Like I’ve written about in previous posts I’ve run gatecamp in a frigate fitted exactly for the purpose but this was a whole other ball game.

My heart leapt into my throat and started beating about as fast as it ever has. And let me tell you, I’ve been in some pretty hairy real life situations in my 31 years. Yet right now the threat of losing my pixel spaceship had my heart beating just as fast as in any of those.

It’s at this point in a movie where you hear the sound of your drill sergeant saying something like “This is what we trained for boys!”. But I’ve never had a drill sergeant. I wasn’t even a boy scout let alone in the army. It is now my firm belief that every new pilot in Eve should be provided with a drill sergeant just for times like these. Get on it CCP.

Heart beating at a million miles an hour, I prepared to execute the MWD/cloak trick. Now this technique is not a difficult one to pull off, but even simple things like remembering your own name can become herculean tasks when your system has just been flooded with vast amounts of adrenalin. Against all expectations I somehow managed not to F$%# it up, and I’m home free.

The rest of the trip is mostly uneventful. I meet the odd solo pilot as they travel to and from gates, but these I either stay cloaked while they move on, or have warped off before they decide I’m a nice juicy target. I make my delivery and Evemail my customer letting him know that the route is dangerous. He (I’m making assumptions here based on in game name) mailed me back complimenting me on the speed of completion and expressing concern for my safety getting back. I had already decided to take the long way back rather than tempting fate on the gatecamp and told him so. Still it was nice of him to be worried.

After making my way home by the long route I did a few more lowsec deliveries with little more incident than a gate rat having a pot shot at me. Those nice easy lowsec runs dried up pretty quickly and all I was really left with was a set of 5 with the same start and finish destinations. I’d been avoiding these because I knew there was trouble to be had. The pick up station was in shallow lowsec but could only be reached by going through this one hot lowsec pipe system. Unless you wanted to travel through around 10 nullsec systems that is.

It would be a bad idea to go for these contracts then wouldn’t it?

I didn’t think so. I was still riding on the high from my earlier encounter. I was freekin’ bullet proof, at least in my own mind anyway.

I made the 20 odd jumps over to the hot system and jumped straight on in. That nothing was waiting for me on the other side only increased my confidence, so I warped straight over to the other gate. Next thing I know 2 Rokh’s have instalocked onto me and unleashed, Thank goodness I’d at least had enough self-preservation left to activate my adaptive invulnerability field before landing on the gate. As it stood they still did around 2000 damage to my shield before I managed to jump through the gate.

Well that sobered me up, not to mention getting my heart rate through the roof … again. That was it. I was not going to take these contracts and if I made if back through those 2 alive I was going to unwrap my shiny new Covetor I’d just learned to fly, crack open a couple of beers and do some nice peaceful mining.

I docked at the nearest station to get my heart rate back under control. Then jumped back through, somehow managing not to mess up the MWD/cloak, flew back to Jita and, as promised to myself, went mining with beer. So here I am a couple of hours later, slightly tipsy telling you about the whole ordeal. I hope the quality doesn’t suffer too much for the beer. I’m a bit of a light weight.

So until next time, this is the Incompetent Capsuleer signing off.

You Can’t Tank Through Stupid.

I played World of Warcraft for a bit over 6 years and raided with really nice PvE guild for most of that time. Our healers had a favourite saying they like to throw at me when I’d done something truly dumb to get myself killed … again.

“I can’t heal through stupid.” is what they used to tell me.

After a couple of painful lessons (such as taking on NPC’s way above my weight class, or looking for a fight in lowsec with no idea what I’m doing while flying a poorly abismally fit Catalyst) I’ve learned to apply our healers wisdom here in Eve as well.

It’s very easy to be stupid as a  new player in Eve. The dangers are far from clear the first time you log in and the only thing I took away from my early lowsec adventures was “Lowsec … Pirates … Scary”. So I headed back into hi-sec, planning to stay there for the forseeable future.

But hi-sec is safe (to a given value of safe) and therefore boring. So I set about learning how to make lowsec less dangerous for myself. I learned what the risks were and how to minimise them. I learned to use my star map properly (It’s probably just me but I found dotlan too confusing and clunky for my purposes) and access all the wonderful information it empowers you with. The various statistics it gives you make it becomes simplicity itself to see how hot, or just plain active a system is.

Now ~1/10 of my contracts involve at least one jump through lowsec and these jumps are often the least dangerous part of my route. I’ve been able to travel unmolested through known pirate systems, simply because I chose to travel through them when the pirates weren’t there.

I even once ran my hi-sec hauler with no cloak, no stabs and no agility bonuses through 4 lowsec systems (then back out through the same 4) to grab some incredibly low-priced cruisers I’d managed to purchase without seeing a soul on Dscan. I’d never have taken the risk with a contract, but with such a low collateral risk and only myself to disappoint, I felt justified in the chance I was taking.

All in all, lowsec is turning out to be much less scary than my initial impressions had led me to believe. I’ve also learnt that, while you can’t tank stupid, if you’re not stupid you often don’t have to tank at all.

I know that one of these days my thrill seeking ways are going to end in a glorious explosion and pirate glee, but until then I’ll be thumbing my nose at the pirates by … well, by not having my nose anywhere near them.

So until next time, this is the Incompetent Capsuleer signing off.

Space Truckin’

Eve life has been quiet the past day or so, hence I’ve had nothing interesting to write about. I’ve been coming up with a few post topics to blog about during these down times so that I don’t get out of the habit of regular posting. Today I’m going to blather on about one of these topics. Namely hauling as a newbie, why I enjoy it, what I do to make it more enjoyable and the methods I employ to make it more efficient.

*** Warning : This post is completely unlike anything I’ve written here so far. If you’re expecting another of my noobish adventures, well then I’m sorry to disappoint. I just haven’t had any lately 😦 ***

Why I enjoy it.

In real life I’ve always avoided all forms of gambling. Knowing that it would soon become a problem for me due to my addictive personality I just didn’t do it. In Eve hauling is a gamble and one without real life consequences.

Everything in Eve seems to be based on a risk vs reward principle. Hauling more so than many in the industrial sector. Every time I take a contract I’m laying out a large part, if not the complete amount, of my total ISK. I gamble this on my ability to complete the contract, usually for a comparatively small return. You hear stories of people packing everything they own into an industrial and shipping it around only to have themselves blown up and lose everything. I do this on a regular basis (only without the getting blown up part). I stand to lose everything on these ventures, not just a percentage of my outlay. If I get caught I lose the whole damn thing. This does not mean that I simply accept any contract just for the thrill of it. I have a long risk/reward check list which I run through before accepting any contract, which helps stack the odds in my favour. If the contract doesn’t fall within my accepted rick/reward parameters I wont take it. Just because I know I’d have a gambling problem doesn’t mean that I would make a bad gambler. The main thing that has stopped me in real life is the knowledge that the house always wins.

The other main contribution to my enjoyment of the hauling gig is the satisfaction in having completed a service for someone. This is the main reason I could never be a mission runner. If I found that fun I’d probably go play World of Warcraft again and do dailies.

Alleviating the boredom.

Most people would think that the act of moving stuff from point a to point b would be as much fun as watching paint dry. In many respects they wouldn’t be wrong. Hi-sec hauling especially can be truly tedious to execute, especially the long haul trips where you spend a lot of time moving through mostly empty systems or running with an empty cargo hold. These are the worst times in the gig and to get through them I like to put on a few different songs to ease my boredom. Here’s my favorite for those boring spots.

Another way I keep the downtime from rotting my brain is writing posts like this one. It makes sitting at my PC while nothing is happening mentally engaging and is slow-paced enough that if £$%# hits the fan I can just drop it for a while and deal with the situation. Posting also doesn’t suffer from the need to check whats happening on my entrance to every system or from longer breaks as I hit a more dangerous part of a haul.

Last but not least is reading and browsing the internet. Whether it’s eve related or just part of my normal daily browsing having dual monitors lets me do this and play Eve at the same time without a problem. All my entertainment is online, I havent watched TV in years, ever since I decide that I hated the adds more than I liked the shows.

Making hauling more efficient.

If your reading this then your reading about a game where even the pirates use spreadsheets to gauge their efficiency. So you will have to excuse me if I throw a little napkin math your way during this section. Also these are just the factors and methods I take into account when doing public contracts. You may have other factors which affect your decision to accept or decline a contract.

Price Point.

The first thing your should do is figure out how much you need to get paid to make hauling worthwhile, the best way is in an ISK/Hour format. To gauge this first you have to calculate how much you would be able to earn doing other activities and set your price point at just above this. If the available contracts are not going to bring in your ISK/Hour requirements then go do something else, they are just not worth your time.

Calculating a contracts actual payout.

The first thing you need to do is calculate the jumps per hour your hauler can manage. For me each jump take ~70 seconds giving me 51 jumps per hour plus change (remember I said napkin math not real math). I knock off 1 jump and the change for time spent docking, undocking, collecting the contract, delivering it and passing through extra-large systems. This leaves me with 50 jumps per hour.

Now browse the contracts for likely offers. Pick one then take the number of jumps in the contract, add the number of jumps away from the pick up point you are, divide the payout of the contract by this number, then multiply it by your jumps per hour. The end result is the ISK/hour payout of that contract.

e.g. I spot a juicy looking contract which pays 2 mil ISK for a 5 jump trip. That’s 400k per jump, so I start drooling. Then I realise it’s 25 jumps away from my current location. This means that it is now only worth 66,666.67 ISK per jump (2,000,000/(5+25) = 66,666.67), or 3,333,333.33 ISK/Hour (66,666.67 * 50 = 3,333,333.33). This no longer looks so attractive so I try to find myself a better deal.

Other Factors.

There are a few other factors that affect whether or not I will accept a contract. These include things like the distance from other contracts. If a contract is pretty far away but is close to 1 or more decent ISK/jump contracts then accepting it increases the value for the whole set as I can then split the travel distance between all the contracts in that area.

Another if these factors is the risk involved. Does the route pass through low-sec/nul-sec? If it’s hi-sec how many 0.5 systems am I going to pass through and are any of them on a high traffic route? How much of my collateral am I being asked to use to guarantee this contract versus the payout? All of these questions affect my decision to accept the contract or not.

The last but arguably the most important set of factors affecting my contract acceptance are the intangibles. The most prominent among these is fun. How much fun is taking this contract going to be? What could I be doing that’s more fun? Contracts take time and that time could be spent doing something else, whether it be another activity in Eve, or playing another game, or even working on a spectacular hangover to enjoy in the morning. By accepting the contract you have to ask yourself if there is something else I’d rather be doing that I can do in this time frame.

 

Well I hope you enjoyed this little departure from the norm, these posts are not going to be an overly regular thing so if you don’t like them, no real harm done.

So until next time, this is the Incompetent Capsuleer signing off.

A Place to Aviod.

After picking up my new ship I scanned the available contracts to see what was worth hauling. The answer was nothing. I was in a downtime where there was nothing but mickey mouse contracts available to me, so I set course for Dodixie to switch ship and do some mining (I hate mining but it’s better than running worthless contracts).

Now I’ve started being careful even when running empty in my haulers. So when I jumped through the gate into Balle I saw that kill right on a vexor before I did anything. I only have 2 outstanding kill rights and those belong to the muppets that ganked the ill-fated TFP mk1. It’s one of the two and he’s got a buddy with him.

I started running through my options. Do I have more tank than last time so I can outlast them? Nope. Theres no way my poor Iteron can stand up to double Vexor ganking. Is there anything I can fast align to? Nope. Nothing. Diddly squat. Now I know why they camp this gate. It’s an 0.5 system on the autopilot route from Jita to Dodixe and I’m going to assume a few others, so it’s busy and theres nothing to quick align to.

So not enough tank and no chance of getting out before they lock me. I was just about to write the TFP mk2 off as scrap when both the Vexors started blinking red. They had just started ganking some other poor sap and while I felt sorry for the guy (or gal) I wasn’t about to let this opportunity go by. I warped to freedom tossing a salute to my unwitting savior as I went.

After making good my escape I switched ships and started mining. I decided that now was a good time to learn to use some of the out of game tools available to me. Namely Eve Who and zKillboard. It was time to do some reasearch on these villans.

I know that all three of the gank perps were from the same corp, the “Tittie Monkey Corporation”. Well that name says a lot for their maturity level. Anyway using Eve Who I looked them up. It appears to be a small 9 man corp based in Balle. I check the corp on zKillboard. It appears that they almost never leave system, they just sit on that gate all day ganking T1 haulers. They appear to work in pairs and always in the same Vexor fit. 3 x warp disruptors, 4 x 250mm prototype gauss guns, some extra damage and some tank. They have no targeting increase so an MWD/cloak T1 hauler could get through them just fine, but with 6 warp disruptors per gank a stabbed up hauler wouldn’t stand a chance. My best option for the moment is to just plain avoid Balle.

While I think what they do is pretty boring, I do salute them for keeping hi-sec dangerous, spicing up my day and to giving me “The Plan™”, more on that another time.

So until next time, this is the Incompetent Capsuleer signing off.

I’m a Wanted Man.

Yesterday I logged in to see a notification that someone had placed a bounty on my head. It was a low ass bounty of 111,111 ISK, so I almost wrote it off as someone randomly placing bounties on people. Then I thought about it for a little while. I hadn’t done anything to tick someone off had I? I haven’t been playing long enough to get up to any real shenanigans.

Well, there was those unattended containers of ore I pilfered a few days ago, but I’m fairly sure I got away without anyone seeing me that time.

Now I think about it, I also did do a bit of ninja salvaging in low DED sites while getting a few mil together to start hauling, but that wasn’t really worth that much was it?

There was also that gate camp I ran repeatedly in my Imicus, that could have ticked ’em off enough to place such a small bounty on me.

Ok, ok. So it seems like in my 9 days of playing Eve I’ve done quite a few things that could have people place a bounty on my head, let’s try and find out which one it was.

I add the guy to my watch list and start trucking. I had no plans. Having finished my exams a few days ago and done my job hunting for the day I had nothing left to do but game and read. I spent most of my time in eve hauling goods back and forth learning more about the hauling gig as I did. I went from a bankroll of 50 mil to over 100 mil. That’s right I’ve finally broken my first ISK landmark.

Anyway I was bouncing all over hi-sec and taking several jobs into low-sec when it seemed like the systems I’d be hauling through were quiet enough and my MWD/cloaker could fit the cargo. Next thing I know it’s 11 pm (here in Ireland anyway) and I’m pretty tired, time to log off.

I check one last time to see if the guy has come online. He has, I must have missed the notification. I shoot him an Evemail asking about the bounty. He replies that I failed one of his contracts. Ah! The suicide gank incident is haunting me again. We chat a bit over Evemail about it and he teaches me how to properly link my combat log. It turns out that I was wrong and he had nothing to do with the gank and the cargo was probably worth the 12 mil to him, not sure how but it probably was. He asks me if I was Auto piloting and I shoot him the abridged version of the story, but at this stage I’m falling asleep at the keyboard since I’d gotten up at 6 am to start my job hunting (an hour to shower and have breakfast, then a couple of hours perusing the early online job offers followed by a couple of hours wondering town looking for help wanted posters) so I log off.

This morning I log on to see my eve mail Icon flashing. It’s from the same guy, and when I saw the contents of the mail I got a warm fuzzy feeling inside. The guy had bought me a new ship! I’d been completely prepared to swallow my losses as just a part of playing the game and this was completely unlooked-for, making me incredibly grateful to the guy.

What really made my heart warm was that when I nipped over to Jita to pick it up I saw that he had even named it. I’d Like you to meet the “fly safe!”.

If you ever run across a guy called CloudyHi Crush give him props for being so nice to a new player. He certainly didn’t have to be.

My takeaway from all this is that I now feel like I owe it to my customers to inform them of the reasons behind any failed contract. Not out of any hope of reimbursement but in the knowledge that they were relying on me to deliver and I had failed them. It’s this level of real social interaction that I’ve been missing from so many of the MMO’s I’ve played.

So until next time, this is the Incompetent Capsuleer signing off.