Reasonable read but the figures are seriously out of kilter. Mining ABC you can easily make 100m per hulk per hour currently. That is great ... except minerals costs feed into every t1 and t2 ship in game (a t1 hull is needed to craft a t2 ship) so the economy is in meltdown in many cases and prices are soaring. That wouldn't matter if people were willing to pay the increased prices but sales volume in a lot of t2 ships is way down. That equation of supply and demand also goes out of kilter because:

4-5 alliances are massively manipulating prices on technetium;

people are anticipating the jita "hell" shutdown at the end of the month;

the anti macroer campaign is biting;

datacore changes could savage invention and therefore all t2 production.

Good time to be a miner or tech owner perhaps.... as long as people are willing to pay your prices.

Personally I've done what many people have and just raised my prices as i'm in an area where demand is much greater than supply. I feel for most other less established or new industrialists though.

Booo.... nowhere near the hotel I stayed at last year. ;)

Actually the game ansd servers are all up again and have been for 2 days now.

Plus if you'd actually followed instructions as per their welcome back post / updates you'd see a link to change your password to let you back in.....

http://www.soe.com/securityupdate/recentupdates.vm

If you'd bothered to do that instead of mouthing off you'd see under subscriptions that every game attached to the SOE account had 45 days subscription even if unsubbed....

Originally posted by Methos12

At max? No, you still cannot run EQ2 on max smoothly mainly thanks to inherently flawed engine.

{mod edit}  anywhere except a large raid I run everything in game on max in EQ2 on even my two backup machines. {mod edit}

Well actually there did use to be regions that were player run, protected  and administered all in the name of one of the NPC factions, i.e. Providence. Problem is as soon as they got into a war with the big bioys they lost due to having a more casual playerbase and a lack of supercapitals. Over the years they built over 51 outposts there and it used to have the highest conentration of 0.0 players in Eve.

I'm wondering if, once the link to Dust is established, we'll get more on planets.

Originally posted by InvaderGUI

Oh Boy! The game that takes the least amount of effort to play won.  People complain how MMOs are being dumbed down  and yet the game that most playing happens offline takes first. Lol very sad indeed.

 

Now that is a sign you either never played Eve Online or are just trolling if you think Eve doesn't take any effort. I've played most of the entries in the top 10 there and the things that keep me working hard in Eve are that my competitors are people not crappy ai's. They adapt, react unpredictably and are always pushing themselves to improve or win. Whether its in a 1v1 interceptor fight or a fleet battle or even a market manipulation. It always comes down to trying to out predictand beat your opponent. If you want easy pick any of the games where your primary opponents are NPC's and that may be one factor why eve seems to always be evolving and won again this year.

Threads like this make me scratch my head. You want what the full game has but you don't want to pay for it ... in fact you specifically mention your other characters...

Saying you want to "test" whether to come back is a weak excuse at best imo as you could just sub your account for a month and experience the full game without the hastle of  the new servers. I pay a massive huge £9.79 a month so its not even expensive.

So just to help with a translation of what you said:

"I want to level a character for free on the new servers and then transfer it to the main servers.... and will probably then sell them."

Personally as a long term and current subscriber I wish they'd stop wasting time on the extended etc game and actually concentrate on improving the main one but sadly I also accept they're a business and need more people so its catch 22.

A good 40-50% of all the mmo players I know well  in Eve also seem to play Dragon Age Origins so tbh there does seem to be a genre crossover as to "likes". Found it an interesting read myself.

I'll relatively agree with you. The problem dynamic though is however much lag is reduced by it just means we force in more and more people into a system to try to take/hold it so its a battle CCP can't win however much they revamp, optimise or upgrade the code or servers.

Lets be honest the idea of having 1,600+ people fighting in a single system as in D-G and H-W is something no other game can even vaguely pretend to attempt. Even if somehow CCP conquer lag with the "Internet Mark II anti-lag wand" we'll just shove 2,000, 2,500 or whatever it takes to take/hold that system same as we did when a titanic battle was 500. I can remember all the same lag complaints back then - mysteriously people seem to forget that.

In the meantime that means all that's happening is a battle against  lag and the game is stagnant. Hard truth is Eve is known as a game that constantly expands and develops - it prides itself on complexity and the darker side of the MMO community. When it stops that expansion people will just complain about a lack of new content.

Besides a lack of change just means boredom and the old player base like me can essentially walk it as we have an unassailable lead. Change means I constantly have to adapt tactics and the way I fight or compete or learn completely new areas of the game.

Drama Lama....

I'm in It so patently I like that playstyle by preference but nothing has changed since the day before those stupid CSM emo whine minutes. If we could survive a week ago we can survive now.

Originally posted by Pyrostasis

Originally posted by Kossuth

Most importantly its linked to a rule of engagement called NBSI or Not Blue Shoot Instantly run by people across almost all of 0.0 sec space.

Aka if you're not our friend you're dying for entering our space......

Yeah there are usually two types of 0.0 space.

NBSI = Not Blue Shoot It (I.E. If its not an ally it dies)

and

NRDS = Not Red Dont Shoot (I.E. if its not an enemy leave it alone)

Yes except NRDS essentially died with CVA run Providence. The fact that Ushra'Khan claim to run NRDS is fairly laughable as 98% of the occupants there don't so NBSI has to be presumed in any engagement.

Besides, not being red and having been attempted to be ambushed a few times crossing their own mostly deserted home area I wouldn't even take their propaganda news pieces as accurate.

Well unless they've set me personally red and that would be plain hurtful as I drink with a few of their old schoolers at the London Eve meet regularly. ;)

Emoing aside there are a number of large 0.0 entities that run NRDS in low sec - its just not advertised too much so hard to tell who.

Originally posted by NightCloak

I'm fairly certain that it derives from an older term taken from UO that references a "safe" or "law-abiding" character.

 

It means that you cannot attack them without being flagged "grey" yourself and CONCORD will come after you in high-sec space if you agress against the "blue" character.

However, I could be quite wrong as its been a LONG time since I played EVE.

 

What post 2 says makes more sense.

 Yes definitely wrong in terms of Eve I'm afraid. ;)

You can also set fleet finder by standings so only blues can join or even see a fleet.

Most importantly its linked to a rule of engagement called NBSI or Not Blue Shoot Instantly run by people across almost all of 0.0 sec space.

Aka if you're not our friend you're dying for entering our space......

Carry on quietly building up my industrial side and pvping - aka the same thing I've been doing since 2003 just now the goals are things I couldn't even dream of back then.

For me its very simple - other players. All the games I've stuck with have good social structures and are very "player" orientated. Asheron's Call 1 (Darktide), Everquest 2 and Eve Online are the three I played for 5+ years each. The games I haven't stuck with have been the ones less player orientated.

In that aspect Eve is stunning - everything is player orientated and in fact the non player elements again are the tedious bits in my opinion. I've built up friendships I've had over years and in turn that motivated me go to the Evemeets in London to actually meet other players I was shooting on a regular basis and find out what made them tick. Nowadays I go to every meet I can and also alliance meets in Europe.

That investment emotionally and ties, whether as opponents or friends, is what keeps you interested because you're not interacting with a computer controlled character you're interacting with a player who is unpredictable and changeable.  Someone with hopes and dreams that change and develop.

As another player I get to help them or fight them and that keeps the game fresh.

PS: Die Northern Coalition die.

As one of those long timers - absolutely you can compete. Your experience in using your ship matters far more than your raw skill points in many combat scenario's in Eve. I fly caps primarily and have negligible idea of interceptor etc combat. Anyone with experience in that area can run rings around me. About the only area  that skill points really matter is indeed caps and supercaps but generally unless you're funding from other characters you won't be flying those for years anyway - by which time you'll probably have found a class of ships and combat style you much prefer.

Originally posted by Cryomatrix

Before I quit, i was going to manipulate the Jita market, but I would have only started with 35 billion in liquid cash. I quit and sold my account for $400 and gave away most of the money . . . even though i would have legitimately sold it like EVE does. Either way, I knew people in my corp who had the following though. Too bad if i never gave away anything i would have come back :(.

Most of my time was spent in shipping or changing buy orders. Sell orders are also effective at times. I'd bring down stuff to sell at times. My alliance was so dumb though they didn't realize that I artificially kept buy prices high in the region, i didn't price gouge as much as could have and I sold in Jita. They accused me of price gouging after i spent a crap load of time and risk bringing down rorqual blueprints to bust my ass to make the first rorqual's in our 0.0 space region and they yelled at me for putting it 100 million BELOW JITA PRICES. They wanted me to sell it at 400-500 million fresh off the boat.

Cryomatrix
 

Not to pick holes in that but you CANNOT legitimately sell isk for real life cash in any format or method. You can sell a GTC for isk however but thats a completely different thing.

A proper market manipulation on a large scale needs extreme resources unless you're just looking at a limited low volume sale item thats sold in limited outlets. I've seen a couple of people do one a couple of years back with the reactions market and both could call on vastly larger sums than you're referring to.

The minerals cost of a rorqual alone is 1.143 bn at me 6 (me 40 subcomponents) so your tale lacks a certain ring of authenticity at 400-500. At best you're confusing the rorqual with the orca.

 PS: You also just admitted to gouging your alliance so really can't act superior and offended when they point out what you're doing.

As one of those pilots in a faction RP alliance, Curatores Veritatis Alliance, that are well known as being strongly allied to the Amarrian Empire there are a whole raft of problems regarding Faction Warfare.

Alliances were "officially" excluded because the inclusion of a single motivated alliance, such as ourselves, with all our huge resources would radically change the balance of power and potentially sideline people who wanted to fight for the faction but were an individual or a small corp. The reality is that it would also give that alliance a way to project its power to any area where its opponents could be found and most of those alliances probably wouldn't care about the roleplaying element at all it would simply be a way to extend their ability to strike at new targets.

Instead, we and other alliances such as Electus Matari on the Minmatar side had members or corps who joined the struggle or helped by providing finances and materials - despite more recent problems we still maintain strong ties to certain corps within the Amarrian faction.

For us the main flaw with Faction Warfare was readily apparent and eventually came to a head when we had to step back from our material support of the whole Faction to just specific more ethical corps. We are a fiercely pro Amarrian and anti-pirate alliance that maintains our region of 0.0 space (Providence) as Not Red Don't Shoot - its an area where thousands of players get to experience 0.0 life for the first time in relative security no matter whether they are an individual, small corp or even an alliance and developing/settling it as an extension of the Amarrian Empire is our primary goal. As part of that we and our allied alliances have planted a total of thirty eight outposts and alliances/corps amounting to over 10,000 individuals now base themselves in our area. Our intel channel alone regularly includes over 1,000 online pilots and putting it in perspective the total online player base is usually 35-50,000.

Mission statement:

The Curatores Veritatis Alliance (CVA), is an alliance based in Providence and lower Domain. The alliance is loyal to the Amarr Empire, with their mission to provide security to the area of Domain that the Amarr Navy and CONCORD cannot, as well as extending the Empire into Providence.

So why did I divert to that background to explain our core motivations?

Well for us the main problem with faction warfare is that there is no way to control membership, exclude spies, or in fact maintain security. Any individual in game can join a faction very easily with the current mechanics. A standard tactic for any pirate was to join the Amarrian faction and then go pirating - quite a few of them in our own area that we were developing for the Amarrian Empire!!!! In fact corporations have joined faction warfare for no other reason than to attack that factions members - lunacy at its best.

The problem with pirate factions and indeed rewards is that it sounds great except it essentially just turns them into another npc corp - another way for people just to grind an income - rather than a way you can support your faction by pvp. Just a few seconds thought easily dictates how you can grind kills for LP's most effectively and never ever ever come near an unfriendly ship. Mmmh perhaps we could have people join opposite sides and kill each other repeatedly - yay easy and you can't stop us as anyone can join and you can't police our activity - we won't in anyway help the faction achieve its goals but we will make a lot of isk!

Unless you find a way to  balance that (sorry CCP as much as I love Eve Online and what you've created you don't have a great track record here) then it will just become the latest FOTM income source for isk farmers.

Anyway enough of my rant as a deeply disappointed FW person!

________________________________________________________________________

Anyone who wants to read about our Allance or its goals/history the main links are as follows:

http://www.cva-eve.org/

http://wiki.eveonline.com/wiki/Curatores_Veritatis_Alliance_(Player_alliance)

Alternatively the next issue of EON has a long article on us or you can get another perspective by talking to the Minmatar roleplaying factions such as Electus Matari (I'd link your forums if I could but no idea where they are or if you have a public element).

Originally posted by cosy

Originally posted by jakojako

Hey, I was just wondering what amount of isk makes people consider you to be "rich" in this game. I know it's probably a lot, maybe 500 bill and up is considered rich, but I was wondering what your opinions were.

Personally i've played for about 3 months and i have around 5 bill, but i still feel extremely poor.

 

rich= income 2x your expenses

Not sure the distinction is meaningful as from an industrialist or traders viewpoint isk unused is wasted.

By that standard despite selling hundreds of t2 ship per month, 20-50 caps and several supercaps I'm poor as a church mouse.

If you don't constantly move forwards in terms of capability you're stagnant and not gaining relative to your competitors.

On the 5bn its vaguely possible I suppose with a lot of help from an established group of players but then i'm not sure thats really qualifying as your income. There are several mission runner hubs where people can do it but tbh you're just leeching then. Not sure dark glitter mining qualifies in 3 montsh and then again you'd be leeching. Trade - sorry that couldn't be your assets your trading. 0.0 ratting mmh well again at 1-3 months thats not really you its friends helping you out.

Now scamming maybe.

Does L2 have specific euro servers or just general ones as I was thinking of trying the game at last?