EPTEVE Corporation - Page 1477
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Firebolt145
Lalalaland34493 Posts
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DefMatrixUltra
Canada1992 Posts
*Twilight Zone music plays* | ||
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419
Russian Federation3631 Posts
On March 15 2013 13:43 KwarK wrote: Just mailed Frood the following. + Show Spoiler + Dear Sir Frooster, I may have accidentally gotten you in trouble. I assumed from our discussion about my intention to continue doing my oracle activities in the north and the okaying of HGs and so forth that I had been granted tacit consent to do that within euni. I now see that this was a misunderstanding. I apologise for the killing of people within sov nullsec. In my defence many of them did aggress on me and therefore I was permitted to return fire by euni rules but some of them, such as the cyno ships, did not provoke me. They did not deserve their fates. Once informed of my error I immediately headed to npc null and am now living in Egbinger. I look forward to roaming into GW and Curse. If you get in trouble for my error then feel free to place the blame entirely on me or share this message and my sincerest apologies with whomever you deem necessary. Yours faithfully, KwarK There may be questions about the death of what appears to be a ratting dominix. But as Kwark's splawyer I would like to categorically deny any accusation that the dominix was peacefully ratting or that he was afk which would mean the Kwark violated the Eve-university terms of engagement, and in fact would like to present evidence that there was something more sinister going on. here are the chatlogs, I take high indignation to any implication that they may have been forged: [ 2013.03.15 03:22:17 ] Aanthord > death to eve-university الله أكبر which clearly proves that he was a DOUBLEPLUS UNFRIEND AGRESSOR against Eve-university. Despite this when Kwark was instructed to stop his POLICE WORK against Goonswarm cynos he immediately stopped shooting the TERROR VESSEL. Unfortunately the dominix then later died to the rats which I blame on "made in If Kwark is sanctioned for this legitimate action of self-defense than the the terrorists have won ![[image loading]](http://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/archive/2012/may/images/american-flag.jpg) | ||
KwarK
United States42971 Posts
Today I plan to tell you a tale of great riches, ingenuity, hubris and poor game design. But where to begin... The Hatchery is the EVE corp of the Starcraft gaming site www.teamliquid.net, open to all members of teamliquid as a community resource. Teamliquid has been around for 11 years now and some people, myself included, have been there as long as they've had internet. A real sense of community emerges, a feeling I expect some members of test and goonswarm are familiar with, and playing other games together, sharing the successes, the learning experience and, sometimes, the failures, is an amazing experience. Teamliquid has microcommunities playing pretty much every online game but for me it was EVE and The Hatchery and this story relates to our play with the factional warfare mechanic. I wasn't the first to take up factional warfare in The Hatchery, that was a pilot named viceorvirtue (vov) who had always tended to experiment with doing his own things rather than playing with the main group. We still talked a lot and were in all the same channels but rather than join in with whatever it was we were doing as a corp he'd try random stuff and that brought him to button orbiting in the weeks that followed the Inferno expansion. Armed with our experience at loyalty point conversions and spreadsheets he quickly worked out that tier 4 conversions were offering around 10k isk/lp on some items and that hypothetical tier 5s was offering around 30k isk/lp. Given that he was making around 30k lp/hr singleboxing these numbers were obviously quite impressive. At this point I was running missions in Delve PvP fit for the impromptu goodfites and although there was money in that what vov was talking about seemed better. So, armed with faction standings for Minmatar but no real clue what I was doing I moved back to empire to try my luck. I felt that missioning might be better than button orbiting for me personally because I've actually always quite liked lowsec missioning (it's somewhat perverse) and had vov ask around the fw community for how to do them. I was assured the best way was to use an afterburning bomber and kite at range while sigtanking. I tried it and it was alright but it got somewhat frustrating to be chased away by random people in frigates or endlessly have my missions camped, coupled with the fact that if you're orbiting inattentively and head towards a group of frigate rats you'll lose your bomber before you can align. The missions still paid 30k loyalty points each which was considerable but actually doing them was somewhat frustrating and in a moment of frustration I demanded to know why you had to do them in a bomber. I was then informed that you don't actually have to and that any ship can go into the level 4 missions, leaving me stunned at the stupidity of everyone who has done fw missions before me. The bomber is an awful ship to use, the ship built for factional warfare missions is, oddly enough, the Caldari Navy Caracal. It's a pretty strong claim to make that the community that had been doing fw missions for years had all been doing it wrong and that I optimised it in just two days of playing it so I ought to justify that. The Navy Caracal is immune to TDs (Minnie were the best faction to fight for), has 90k range (which allows it to kite the missions with ease), has comparable speed and agility to a frigate when dual nano fit, has the dps to break the missions and is actually pretty capable against random frigates. It passes gatecamps with the same ease of a bomber if you have any kind of lowsec experience, it doesn't immediately die if you tab out while running the mission and something unexpected happens (enemy militia frig warps in, rats spawn near you, lucky hit happens, orbit into rocks, whatever), it has a more accessible skillset, it's cheap, it can defend itself vs small groups of frigates and, most importantly, it is very, very multiboxable. The fit used was just a rack of HMLs, mwd lse sebo invuln web in the mids, 2 nano 2 bcs in the lows with standard shield buffer rigs. Armed with the revolutionary good way of doing factional warfare missions I sought to find other ways to improve the isk/hr. We optimised a circular route that went through all 15 Minmatar mission systems, starting in the factional warfare area and ending in the factional warfare area, so we could pick up 15 missions at once and then go out to the Amarr side to complete them. This was combined with using warp speed rigged interceptors to pick the missions up and then switching to a caracal navy at the 15th agent, the overall route was a figure of 8 with one half being mission pickups in an interceptor, the other being mission completes in a caracal. More importantly, the caracal was very, very multibox friendly. For those who have no familiarity with factional warfare level 4s, 3/4 of them only involve the killing of 3 or 4 grouped industrials or a single named battleship so they can be done by hitting orbit at 90k on the battleship, pressing f1 and tabbing out for a minute, although with the industrial missions you did have to press f1 again every 20 seconds. You could literally run a half dozen clients on a single screen with ease once you go into the routine. I've made a nice flow chart for those who are into that kind of thing. It's not so bad once you get into the swing of it. + Show Spoiler + ![[image loading]](http://www.teamliquid.net/staff/KwarK/evefw.png) There are a few developments to this for which I was not solely responsible due to incompetence, I was completely unaware of the autopilot optimise feature for example which hugely cut down on the cycle completion time by reducing the number of jumps to do all 15 missions. Also I'm sure a lot of other people found out the exact same methods I did independently, I only know about our development of it in The Hatchery for which I can unashamedly take 90% of the credit. The ship, the fitting, the route, the missions chosen (you can decline all but the most blitzable) and even the fw corp used were mine and the income was pretty staggering. A fifteen mission cycle would pay roughly 420,000 LP and take a little over two hours assuming nothing went horribly wrong. Throw in hexaboxing (because why not) and you're looking at a little over 2,500,000 LP from a single cycle. Unfortunately this was back before CCP had implemented bulk LP conversions, despite our begging for it on the forums, and it was too much LP to just hit the high isk/lp conversions but back then with +5 implants at around 120m there was still 3k isk/lp in those at tier 4 which put my income at several billion hourly. Then came the revelations about the goon manipulation of fw and CCP robbing them of all the profits of their hard work. In the fallout Minmatar remained the strongest factional warfare faction, even if their previous success had largely been down to goons it didn't matter, they had been successful enough for long enough that Minmatar were the faction that people who wanted isk did fw for. This is due to the broken nature of the fw mechanics although I'll go into that in more depth later as it doesn't really matter here. What did matter is that Minmatar had taken off as the faction to play for and not long after this they achieved a tier 5. How the tier system used to work is that LP income was constant, whatever the tier was at, but the LP store halved the isk cost and LP cost of everything from tier 3 (base prices) to tier 4 and then again from tier 4 to tier 5. This meant things like +5 attribute enhancers could be purchased from the LP store during a tier 5 cashout at around 7k isk/lp and other more unusual 5%s at even higher rates. If you plug the 7k isk/lp number into the 2.5kk lp/cycle number then you get 17.5kkk isk per cycle which is a rather silly number. I have the worst opsec of anyone and this was an open secret in The Hatchery which led to a pretty insane time to be a newbie in our corp. Because we were open to any teamliquid member as a community resource there were players joining and being advised to make multiple 51 day trial accounts for button orbiting in stabbed merlins (a technique which we also did quite a lot of but has been discussed to death elsewhere). Then, when tier 5 rolled around, an older member with some liquidity would give them a shopping list, a pile of isk and a load of stuff to buy from the LP store (because the new guy couldn't possibly have the liquidity to cash out his LP) and take the LP goodies off of them. The 1 week old new player would then go onto the character bazaar and buy a tengu toon for about 4.5b isk and then put it in a caracal navy and apply to our fw corp. They'd request standings and be fleeted when someone else completed and would immediately have faction standings to begin doing level 4s themselves. By the next tier 5 they could buy another 3 and start quadboxing them. By their third week playing EVE they'd be buying a 80m SP toon because why not. As I said, it was a pretty insane time. We only had around a dozen active veterans farming this but a series of factional warfare corps (RAM Legion, RAM Legion Dot, RAM Legion Dot Reloaded Dot) were spawned with corp hangars filled with prefit, bulk bought caracal navies and available ammo as they were lost in droves. The isk generation was such that losing them was pretty much taken for granted and treated as a cost of doing business, the time taken to reship was far more valuable than the ship itself. Interesting secondary challenges spawned such as the race to Jita when tier 5 hit to hit the buy orders leading to some members converting their LP in lowsec with a jump freighter ready while others would produce low volume high isk/lp implants only to find the buy orders gone by the time they got there. By the middle of the summer we had invited a few select out of corp friends in on the scheme because why not (although I'm still resented in The Hatchery by some for not keeping my mouth shut). While all this was going on people were mostly complaining about stabbed afk merlins and incursus' which was somewhat amusing to us as, as near as I can tell, we were the only ones really doing missions. A lot of arguing about what exactly the problem with factional warfare was went on on the forums and none of them mentioned the problem of a small group of players dumping half a trillion of LP products on the market each Minmatar tier 5. The mission problem had always been there, missions had been paying out 30k LP each for years and had been blitzable for years, but it seems that nobody really joined the dots and realised that when Inferno made LP incredibly valuable then that'd have a knockon impact on the missions. I kind of got lucky there as I decided to do them largely on a whim, but missions were, and still are, the best source of FW LP in the game. Eventually CCP announced their intention to fix all this in November which was, again, pretty hilarious to us because of how out of touch (no offence) they were. Problems with the factional warfare mechanic were causing a huge PLEX spike, making normal highsec missions have negative isk/lp conversions and inflating pretty much any "I'm rich, why not" commodity such as link alts, AT hulls, pirate implant sets and the like. I kept saying that if they had any clue how bad things were they would stealth patch it overnight. Then they did and I ended up looking pretty stupid. Unfortunately I was working on the basis that the best time to hoard +5s for the inevitable increase following the end of the FW boom would be in the few weeks before the change and wasn't actually holding any when it got stealth patched (instead preferring liquid isk to buy a pretty impressive AT ship collection). That surprise cost me a few hundred bil but I think overall we got the better of CCP. So, that's how The Hatchery broke the EVE economy (for the second time oddly enough) and made themselves a few trillion. Now onto why FW was broken from our perspective, although I think we had a better view of it than most. The problem with Inferno FW was always the tier system and the way it devalued LP items by reducing both the LP and isk conversion cost of items. With all four factions having the same main group of items the price of the item would be set by whichever faction had the highest tier, a conversion which was normally good at tier 3 would be so amazing at tier 4 that everyone would use it until it was reduced to just good at tier 4 and completely worthless at tier 3. What this meant is that if you're the faction getting the highest tier then you end up rolling in money and the act of wallowing in your piles of isk actually prevents the opposing faction from being able to buy ships to fight you. The original goon manipulation set Minmatar up as the tier 4 faction and people who understood what this meant flocked to them to collect their free money. The result is an avalanche that picks up its own momentum, the carebears flocked to Minmatar and Amarr LP became increasingly worthless as they were reduced to tier 2 and lower until resistance crumbles and the tier 5 push becomes possible. The emergence of a tier 5 faction is the death of any kind of competition for the warzone, it pulls an army of carebears to itself and they're all hungry for the next tier 5, the weight of their pressure on the warzone becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. There are multiple aspects to this issue. Firstly, that the reward was so incredibly lopsided that it pulled every carebear who knew what they were doing into factional warfare on the side of a single faction. Secondly, that it created a dominant faction and bankrupted their opposing faction because they have the same LP store and any cashout below tier 5 was made worthless by the existence of large volume tier 5 cashouts. Thirdly, the amount of warzone control needed for a tier 5 is very high and getting it when you're fighting against the army of carebears and when tier 4 is just not profitable. This meant that no medium sized group of dedicated pilots could reasonably attempt to make any kind of change to the fortunes of their faction and be rewarded for their efforts. Even if they retook a few systems, generated a lot of LP and donated it they would still only be able to up themselves from tier 1 to tier 3 which is still a negative isk/lp conversion. The relationship between tier and overall warzone control disincentivised trying to affect any small change. With the first tier 5 the fight for the warzone was over and the market had picked a winner, if you were an Amarr fw pilot the only logical course of action was to switch to Caldari and still hang out in Amarr space hunting Minmatar people which is exactly what a lot of them did. The months of complaints about button orbiting and the like missed the fundamental problems which were with the way that warzone control tiers were achieved and the way they gave their reward. To put it simply, it was a war in which you couldn't change anything and the game would punish you for trying while simultaneously showering your opponents in free money and success. On an unrelated note, Nulli (I think it was them) who moved to FW to make money and joined the Amarr and then cashed out at tier 4 and quit. You're all fucking retarded. No, really. Do you guys hate money? "Let's pick the least profitable faction, invest weeks in grinding them to be slightly less profitable, make the least amount of money possible for the most work spent grinding and then quit right before we get anywhere". Jeez. Also CCP didn't actually ever fix FW missions. You can still pick up as many of them as you like, whatever the patch notes claim, they're still several hundred million isk/hr/client at tier 3. Anyone interested can still multibox billion isk hours although the missile nerf hurt the caracal navy method. If I was willing to undock for billions then I'd totally do that. Also sorry to everyone in Minmatar FW who actually made the tier 5s happen by donating what they thought were considerable amounts of LP. You guys are heroes and we leeched off of you. In our defence, it was a matter of principle to us that we didn't donate any LP to actually getting the tier 5, it seemed too much like roleplay, but we appreciate your efforts and we're sorry that we completely devalued all your work by piggybacking off your success and asking you to donate a large portion of your own LP, even though any one of us could have spared the LP to tier 5 by themselves. | ||
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Firebolt145
Lalalaland34493 Posts
'the man who made it happen' ahahahahaha really, Kwark? | ||
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KwarK
United States42971 Posts
On March 15 2013 16:39 Firebolt145 wrote: Yet another brag post 'the man who made it happen' ahahahahaha really, Kwark? Maybe one day you'll do something worth bragging about. | ||
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Firebolt145
Lalalaland34493 Posts
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KwarK
United States42971 Posts
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Pretty Aluminum
United States95 Posts
So anyways like I said I was just wondering how much political power TL actually had. Were any of you involved in Battle of Asakai, the 3,000 person battle not to long ago. Thanks in advance if anyone reads this and answers the questions of a noob. | ||
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419
Russian Federation3631 Posts
+5 implants at around 120m there was still 3k isk/lp in those at tier 4 which put my income at several billion hourly. tier 5 you mean? | ||
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Firebolt145
Lalalaland34493 Posts
On March 15 2013 18:45 Pretty Aluminum wrote: Hey I don't really play EVE, but it still has a super interesting history for a game. So I was just wondering how big TL actually is on EVE. I know Something Awful has some power, and Reddit of course has some power, and you guys are probably smaller than both of them I'm assuming so don't take it personally if I'm way off. So anyways like I said I was just wondering how much political power TL actually had. Were any of you involved in Battle of Asakai, the 3,000 person battle not to long ago. Thanks in advance if anyone reads this and answers the questions of a noob. We are not involved in any of that. This is partly because we are much smaller, but more importantly, because we don't want to be involved. It's very exciting to read about and observe these huge power struggles in nullsec and so on, but it's extremely boring to actually participate in them. The skill in it is also mainly focused around things similar to real-life wars (logistics, maintaining motivation, etc) rather than your actual ship piloting skill, which is what we prefer to focus in. | ||
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419
Russian Federation3631 Posts
I quit eve. We are We | ||
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Firebolt145
Lalalaland34493 Posts
Speaking on behalf of TL. Nice try though ~ | ||
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Pretty Aluminum
United States95 Posts
On March 15 2013 19:11 Firebolt145 wrote: We are not involved in any of that. This is partly because we are much smaller, but more importantly, because we don't want to be involved. It's very exciting to read about and observe these huge power struggles in nullsec and so on, but it's extremely boring to actually participate in them. The skill in it is also mainly focused around things similar to real-life wars (logistics, maintaining motivation, etc) rather than your actual ship piloting skill, which is what we prefer to focus in. How long would it take for me to actually get good at this game if I started playing? | ||
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KwarK
United States42971 Posts
On March 15 2013 19:28 Pretty Aluminum wrote: How long would it take for me to actually get good at this game if I started playing? Depends how you learn. Sometime between a week or two and never. Most eve players select never but also check a box called "give me positive feedback despite glaring ignorance". | ||
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Rengas
United States169 Posts
On March 15 2013 18:45 Pretty Aluminum wrote: Hey I don't really play EVE, but it still has a super interesting history for a game. So I was just wondering how big TL actually is on EVE. I know Something Awful has some power, and Reddit of course has some power, and you guys are probably smaller than both of them I'm assuming so don't take it personally if I'm way off. So anyways like I said I was just wondering how much political power TL actually had. Were any of you involved in Battle of Asakai, the 3,000 person battle not to long ago. Thanks in advance if anyone reads this and answers the questions of a noob. Some Hatchery folks are currently in VoC (a mity sov holding alliance with highly strategic systems in Insmother) so technically they're a pretty big deal and yes we played a key role in the Battal of DBRB Welp Leviathan. | ||
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Impervious
Canada4207 Posts
Also, back when just VoV was doing the FW stuff, I kept asking him why nobody was doing the missions. He told me you needed to use bombers, so I thought "why not buy bomber accounts which pay for themselves within hours?" since he gave me a rough idea that you could make ~300 million isk an hour. To that, his response was "or you could make a 51, orbit beacons until it can use a bomber, than use said bomber?". I thought the answer was fucking crazy, because the character could pay for itself so fucking quickly, and if you aren't dumb, resell for a profit anyways..... | ||
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Viceorvirtue
United States273 Posts
Im pretty sure we ended up doing the same thing with the tengu characters after ccp changed the tier system though. The more interesting thing now is to see if CCP will change the standings mechanics or agents now that bad bobby and kwark decided to spill the beans on how fw is stil broken. Not that getting 300-500m an hour at t3 isnt somewhat broken in and of itself ofcourse. | ||
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419
Russian Federation3631 Posts
![[image loading]](http://imgur.com/XSCUD5j.png) #swag | ||
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Galdo
United States338 Posts
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