Ugh just got scammed out of a ME 1 PE 1 Naglfar BPO. My fault for being stupid and greedy.

I’ve been researching a couple of Naglfar BPOs thinking I might as well get some use out of my research slots as well as make use of my ISK that’s just sitting around. So finally I decide to sell them off because I didn’t want to hold on to them for too long. Put up a contract for 2.7 billion and while I was sitting around, I got a convo request from someone called Yummy Yummy Yummy.

Normally I don’t even open up Jita local and ignore all chat requests, but for some reason I decided to open this one. He offered me 5 PLEX for the BPO, which obviously was worth more than 2.7 billion. My first (and correct) instinct was to tell him to just sell the PLEX and buy the contract. However I guess my greed got the better of my brain and I said sure. I thought I checked the trade carefully, but long story short I ended up with 5 plastic wraps renamed as PLEX.

Sigh, not a good day. Looks like my Naglfar BPO investment will end up as a loss.

Moral of the story : never ever ever ever accept any trade unless it’s in a contract, and even then check very carefully. Another lesson relearned.

I’ve joined my new (old) corp with both Noork and Yannie, only to find that the alliance has been war-decced by Marmite, Gevlon’s Jita-camping friends. At the same time, some Goons are attacking some alliance assets in Syndicate, resulting in the Syndicate players also having a hard time undocking. The corp policy is not to undock for any kind of PVE activity while under a high-sec wardec, which I have no problems with as it makes a whole lot of sense. So I’m basically just updating orders and skill training and watching people complain in corp chat that they can’t mission to make their subscription due to the wardec. Kek.

A couple of days ago I was driving home from grocery shopping with the wife and kid. As I was moving off from a 4-way intersection after the light turned green, a grey BMW suddenly cut around in front of me and sped off. Within 10 seconds I heard police sirens and made way for a police car which magically materialized from nowhere and promptly pulled the grey BMW over at a side lot. My only thought? CONCORDOKKEN’ED!

Last week in Marvel Puzzle Quest, there was a week-long event called Thick as Thieves which consisted of a main event and a sub-event every day. You could do repeatable PVE missions in both the main and sub-event with points that reset every 8 hours, with the winners in each sub-event getting covers for Wolverine (Patch) and the winners in the main-event getting covers for a new character, Daredevil. This event was also the first time the developers introduced a scaling system for enemy levels. As players completed missions, the levels of enemy NPCs would increase, from level 17 up to a maximum of 230. The scaling affected all sub-events and the main event as well and did not reset with a new sub-event. So a lot of players wound up facing all level 230 enemies after the first sub-event because they grinded the repeatable missions like crazy. However, it was discovered and even posted in the forums that “tanking”, or intentionally losing missions, would decrease the levels of the enemies. So my wife and I would just do the PVE missions every 8 hours, and in between use our characters to enter battle, retreat, etc. This way our opponents stayed at minimum level all the time and it was really easy for us to finish all the missions. We managed to place either 1 or 2 for almost all the sub-events and in the end my wife finished 1st in the main event, while I placed top 10 because I ran out of time (wasted it doing the sub-event even though I was clearly already in 1st place).

The funniest part was the shit-storm that hit the forums after that where so many players complained about losing to scrubs with low-level characters (you can see the rosters of other players). There were rampant accusations of cheating and unbalanced missions, normally also accompanied by the comment “and I refuse to tank missions”. The best part was when the player who eventually ended up number 2, losing to my wife, posted about how he was overtaken in the last minute by “someone who was probably using money to buy boosts because otherwise it’s impossible they could have gained points so fast”. When my wife read that she literally danced a jig of joy in the middle of the room. We had already maxed out our Wolverine covers and didn’t particularly want Daredevil, but decided in the end to reach top placement just to annoy all the people who were too dumb to tank. Seriously why in the world would you fight level 230 enemies when you can keep them down at <30 just by taking a half hour during the day when you're not playing to just enter battle, retreat repeatedly.

A few days ago the market for one of the mindlinks I trade in went a bit bonkers. The average price reported in the market seemed to have tanked to ridiculous levels, causing warnings whenever I updated my orders. Being a bit curious, I looked at the historical prices to see what happened.

The bio says it all

On 12th Nov, it looks like someone sold about 10-15 mindlinks for 45,000 ISK instead of 45,000,000. Looking at my journal history it appears I was the beneficiary of 2 of these free mindlinks. A quick glance at the bio page of the “victim” provides insight into how this could have happened. Typing is still a valuable skill, train it to at least level 4… although this guy must not have even injected the skill book if he could fat-finger three 0s.

CCP Ytterbium just posted that High Energy Physivs IV has been dropped from the skill requirements for the Bastion module. Instead, being able to fly Marauders will let you use the Bastion module as well.

This is something that I asked for in the Marauder threadnaught as well, because High Energy Physics IV simply made no sense and served no purpose other than being an arbitrary skill that needed to be trained. It did not benefit the performance of the ship in any way. Furthermore, one of the major downsides of Marauders has always been the extremely lengthy skill training times. In fact, some people have noted that a new player can get into a carrier faster than they can get into a Marauder. Since Bastion mode is being made an integral part of Marauders, in effect leaving High Energy Physics in would just mean adding yet another skill to the list of Marauder pre-reqs.

Of course, this being the Internet and all a couple of retarded pilots were quick to defend the inclusion of HEP 4 when I mentioned this in the Marauder feedback thread. One German idiot even went so far as to say he agreed that HEP 4 made no sense and was an arbitrary choice, but still it should be the skill requirement for Bastion. Say what? It makes no sense, but it should still be there? Impeccable reasoning on display right there. His rational was “you can always undock and fly a Marauder without Bastion”. I can also undock and fly a stealth bomber without a Cov Ops cloak, guess how good an idea that is.

My guess is, despite CCP’s clear-cut warning that Bastion skills could be changed, he was one of the many silly people that went ahead and trained HEP 4 early on. Guess reading is still a helpful skill in life. One person even posted that he can’t stand it when CCP “gives warnings that only serve to cover their asses later on”. Poor CCP, it really reminds me of those appliance manufacturers that have to make warning labels saying “Do not stick tongue in socket” because otherwise they’ll get sued by some idiot.

Honestly, when I first started posting again I told myself that I should try to stay clear of rants about stupid people. But sometimes the stupid is just overwhelming and I can’t help myself so here goes.

Over the weekend, it was found out that CCP had secretly given 30 Ishukone Scorpion hulls to employees of the EVE gambling site Somer Blink as a reward for working with CCP on an event ran by Somer Blink. That event also created a ragestorm but I digress…

In any case the EVE playerbase (or at least the noisy and belligerent portion of it, which is probably 80%) is up in arms about it. Again.

I wonder if it’s because EVE tends to attract people who have an anarchist, anti-authority streak. Or maybe it’s because the EVE playerbase has been basically static for many years, leading to this “bitter-vet” relationship with CCP where it seems cool to take any opportunity to shout in CCP’s ear “YOU GUYS SCREWED UP AGAIN YOU SUCK” all while dutifully buying another 6 months of PLEX.

As usual Jester has written a very level-headed piece explaining his take on the affair. And also as usual the munchkins have descended on him with flaming pitchforks in the comments section for daring to actually defend CCP (obviously because he’s a member of the CSM, not because… you know… he’s right).

The basic arguments against CCP can be broken down into 1) CCP should not give anything to in-game entities 2) it is favoritism 3) it shouldn’t be done in secret.

1) YOU NO GIVE STUFF

For the first part, the Ishukone Scorpion is inferior in every way to a regular T1 Scorpion (and no one claims a regular Scorpion is awesomesauce). It refines to 1 tritanium, so it doesn’t even have a baseline price. It’s only value is to collectors, and apparently the ship sells for 10-20 billion. Why? God only knows. So basically CCP gave each employee of Somer Blink some ISK. Well guess what, every time CCP changes anything in the game it’s giving some in-game entity some ISK. Up the veldspar requirements for ships? Everyone who held on to stocks of veldspar got some ISK. Buffed interceptors? Everyone who makes interceptors got some ISK. Someone commented in Jester’s post that it could be compared to CCP giving TEST 600B ISK just when they needed it to fight Goonswarm. And my reply to that is that sure they could, but why would they? I mean seriously why are people saying that CCP is not accountable when there is already the best reason for being accountable there is: CCP obviously will not as a company intentionally destroy their own livelihood. Gevlon claims that EVE markets are a zero-sum game where giving some people ISK automatically makes all others lose. Yes, this is theoretically true. In practice, do you think there is going to be any noticeable effect? (other than on the price of the Ishukone Scorpion, which if you were speculating on it then it sucks to be you because there is no rational price point for the item meaning there is always a tremendous risk of the price crashing) 600 billion is pretty much chump change in the context of the entire in-game economy, I don’t cry because my assets are devalued by 0.0002%.

2) CCP has a crush on Somer Blink

As usual people are mistaking equal opportunity for equality. As Jester notes, it’s not the first time CCP has given the Ishukone Scorpion to players for community work. You want an Ishukone Scorpion too? Go ahead and put a ton of effort into developing a well-run community site that’s used by a huge number of players. It’s not like the opportunity isn’t there. And for the people claiming that there were numerous other entities that do community work that didn’t receive gifts, well gee I guess that means CCP didn’t think they were important enough, tough luck. Not everyone gets a gold star just for writing a random EVE blog that no one reads (like me).

If CCP gave gifts to random pilots because they were high-school classmates of some developer and took Online Spaceships 101 together then you would have a case for favoritism. Saying Somer Blink didn’t “deserve” anything is just sour grapes, because no one other than CCP has any relevant say in what is deserving or not.

3) THE PEOPLE HAVE A RIGHT TO KNOW!

This part cracks me up the most. It’s amazing how well-suited many EVE players are to be middle-management personnel. Picture a committee meeting where 2 departments are discussing something, and a whining voice pipes up “I wasn’t informed of this!” “Well Dave, it didn’t have anything to do with you, Office Supplies isn’t involved in the project…” “Well we are an important part of the company, and I DEMAND that we be KEPT IN THE LOOP!” “Ok Dave, we’ll include you in the emails next time, do you have any input to the project now?” “Erm.. yes… it looks good, carry on.”

Honestly, what would be the difference? It was an event run by CCP and Somer Blink. If they had told everyone, there could only be 2 possible reactions from anyone not involved. 1) Raise a shitstorm. 2) “Erm, ok. Carry on.” How is this different from not telling everyone? The people demanding transparency are just asking for information for information’s sake, not because it’s actually important. What’s stopping CCP from doing under-the-table deals (that are actually significant)? The fact that if it gets out they face a public relations disaster, which is exactly what stops (some) companies in real life from shady deals, not the reams and reams of accounting policies and rules. Look at how much those regulations have stopped banks from having scandals…

Doh. Sometimes you do things that really make you wonder if you forgot to turn on the brain in the morning.

Well at least I hope it’s not just me.

I just got podded for the first time since playing EVE. Lost a full set of +4 implants, plus another set of missile skill hardwiring implants that I put in for missioning a while back that cost about 320 million ISK.

Did I get ganked by an evil army of ninja salvagers in my awesome Rattlesnake? Unfortunately it’s not as dramatic as that…

It all started due to my new hobby of ship collecting. I am currently building up a collection of all T1 combat ships, from frigates all the way up to battleships. I’ve already got a fair number of them, but I’ll elaborate more in a future post.

Anyway I was looking through the list of frigates when I remembered, “Hey, I’ve got a bunch of old Gallente ships back in Couster from doing the tutorials! Might as well haul them back to add to the collection instead of buying new hulls!” Plus I get to tidy up my assets tab, I’m a neat freak like that. Couster was 11 jumps away, which was why I had left them there instead of flying them with me way back when I moved over to Caldari space.

Each hull took about 2,500 m3 worth of space though, so I needed a big hauler. Fortunately as part of training up for my freighter, I had trained Gallente Industrial V so my Iteron V had a whopping 25,000 m3 cargohold with full cargo expanders (without cargohold rigs). Plenty of space… Hopped in, fitted 3 medium shield extenders, an invulnerability field and a medium shield booster just because they happened to be lying around.

And then I made the fateful mistake of all newbie pilots… autopilot. I figured I’d be pretty safe anyway since most pilots would scan their targets before suicide ganking, amirite??? I mean why gank an empty industrial just for kicks… plus I had some sort of tank right? So off I go, slowly trucking along, while I went downstairs for some breakfast and to play with my kid.

Came back and found myself in a station… looking at an Ibis. “Hmm, that’s weird, could have sworn I didn’t dock….” Then saw that I was in Jita…. wtf. Sinking feeling… damn I was podded!

At first I couldn’t believe that anybody would have bothered suicide ganking an empty Iteron V… until I remembered a tiny little detail. Like joining the Caldari Militia. Which made me enemies to the Gallente, and attackable by the Gallente Navy in Gallente high-security space…. such as Couster.

Geez. Those frenchies must have wondered wtf this Caldari noob was smoking, jumping into their turf in a little Iteron V and idling at the jump gate. NPCs don’t pod players though, so some Gallente pilot must have come across my pod spinning in space and gleefully crushed it. Blaaaaaargh.

So, just to pick up a bunch of ships worth less than 1 million in total, I jumped 11 systems to get my Iteron V destroyed (worth more than all the other ships combined), then lost half-a-billion ISK worth of implants. Sigh yai yai. I’ve replaced the +4 implants, but will probably wait until I’m really going missioning before replacing the skill hardwiring implants. In case I pull another dumb one…

Still training Minmatar Frigate V as of now, with about 6 days to go. Looking at my skill plan in EVEMon puts me at about 19 days to get most of the important gunnery skills up to 4, including T2 autocannons. Actually I could just go out right now and start blowing things up (most likely myself) but there’s no real rush.

I plan to do something similar to Nashh’s Project Rifter and put together a few Rifter packages to use up while hopefully learning something about low-sec PvP. My planned Rifter fit looks very similar to his, except with 150mm autocannons since I can’t fit the 200’s on without blowing the powergrid. Although one possibility is to mount a mix of 150s and 200s but I don’t think that’s a good idea. Another possibility is a powergrid implant, but I’m hesitant to use those since I foresee a lot of violent flaming clone death in my future.

I originally intended to get into Faction Warfare, but now I’m having second thoughts since Noork is my freighter pilot. I don’t want to have to worry about meeting a Gallente Militia blob somewhere when I’m piloting my huge defenceless Obelisk shipping valuable stuff around. Besides, it seems most of the fighting in faction warfare occurs in low-sec anyway so I can just hang around in those systems and try to find targets without being in the Caldari Militia. I plan on naming all my Rifters “Boo”, in honour of the miniature giant space hamster that accompanies the insane ranger Minsc in Baldur’s Gate 2. My battle cry shall be “Go for the eyes, Boo!!!” as I recklessly attack anything cruiser-sized and below.

On the trading side, I think I’m up to 10 billion ISK now in assets and orders but it’s hard to tell with a fair amount of ISK tied up in contracts. These can really be lucrative, it’s a shame I didn’t try it out sooner. Although it does take up additional time to check the market which can sometimes be a bit of a pain. I’ll probably be losing some ISK in the future with my Rifter shenanigans, and my 2x PLEXes per month will cost me 660 million ISK which is not to be sneezed at. But I think I’m still in the black so that’s not a problem.

Sometimes I wonder why people seem to have this disdain for the 0.01 bidding wars in Jita. When people comment about it on blog posts, I always seem to hear this undertone of “I’m above participating in such activity”. There’s no other way to explain why so many people like to change their bids by totally ridiculous amounts. Like… 5 ISK. Wow. Or 10 ISK. Really… that’s soooo different from 0.01 ISK. Do these people really feel happier about themselves? In practical terms it doesn’t really affect the market; while changing the price by 1 ISK instead of 0.01 ISK does represent a 100-fold increase in the rate of change of the price, in absolute terms it’s pretty negligible. However it just makes me shake my head and wonder why people have to do such silly pointless things just to feel like a special snowflake.

I also saw another trader put up 5 items for sale… in 5 batches of 1 item each, for the exact same price. I wonder if it’s someone who hasn’t figured out that you can post items in stacks, or someone who genuinely thinks it gives him some kind of advantage rather than just wasting their order slots.

News of the guy who lost 74 PLEX in a Kestrel in Jita has been making the rounds. Frankly I’m not altogether surprised, as I think many people expected something like this to occur ever since CCP allowed PLEX to be moved around. The exact means was a bit unexpected, but what I’m really surprised at is the number of people that seem to think that CCP has some sort of obligation to reimburse the PLEX destroyed.

Many people have already pointed out that it’s no different from a supercarrier or titan being destroyed, in terms of ISK value. Heck, I remember about a month ago some guy lost an entire collection of blueprints in an Iteron V which was worth something like 14 billion ISK as well. However, the fact that it’s PLEX and “Real Munnies!!!” involved seems to have made a lot of people think that there is something different in this.

Why? If I go to a Ferrari dealership and splurge on a shiny new Ferrari with all the extras, in perfect working condition, only to completely total it by running full-speed into a tree while pulling out of the dealership parking lot, is Ferrari somehow obligated to reimburse me?

If I buy a Sony 40″ plasma TV and 6 months later decide to sell it at a flea market, only to drop it on the floor while moving it to my car… Am I supposed to complain to Sony customer service that I did not receive the service which I paid for?

One of the commenters on Wilhelm’s post who thinks CCP is open to the possibility of a lawsuit even claims to be a lawyer… are people really so tolerant of incredible stupidity that this idea can even be raised for more than 2 seconds without being met by loud and unending laughter? Ok, granted that it is in the personal interest of lawyers to promote the filing of numerous spurious lawsuits so that they can grow fat on lawyer fees, but sadly he’s not the only one who thinks CCP has a responsibility to heal stupid.

Again, this is not even just some random suicide ganking. From what I’ve read (and in no way did I put in any effort to corroborate the facts, but what the heck):
1) The pilot chose to use a poorly tanked T1 frigate (looks like a cyno alt fit) to transport 22 billion ISK of goods
2) The attackers had an active war-declaration against the pilot’s alliance/corp
3) The attackers were in battleships, which take quite a while to lock small targets like the Kestrel, and the killmail shows that artillery weapons were used, meaning it wasn’t smartbombs that killed him
4) The guy was killed at a Jita gate, which means he was AUTOPILOTING WITH 74 PLEXES DURING A WARDEC and afked for so long that he lost his cloak after jumping in and then got locked and killed

This is not about some guy walking along the road and falling into a hole. This is a guy who looked on the map for the Pit Of Stupid, tied his shoelaces together and then jumped in headfirst while filming himself going “look Ma, see what I can dooooooooo”.

Even if the pilot obtained the PLEX through buying GTCs from CCP, the transaction was fully completed as he received the number of PLEX he bought. He did not need to transport the PLEX to utilise them, and he was fully aware that he ran the risk of losing them if he undocked with them. A lot of people speculate that he was trying to arbitrage on PLEX prices, which to me is another folly on itself since the return is miserable for that kind of investment. A 10 million return for a 300+ million investment? The sales tax alone would be 3 million out of the 10 milion. I don’t even bother trading in any market that doesn’t give a minimum of 10% return because it’s a waste of time, and that’s without even taking the risk from hauling into consideration.

Even if CCP added 20 warning pop-ups whenever someone tried to undock with PLEX, someone somewhere in the universe will still lose a cargohold of PLEX.

No wonder we have wonderful warning signs like these. Unfortunately the next generation of stupid will be unable to read, so they’ll have to have audio versions.

As plenty of people have already observed, Jita 4-4 is a wretched hive of scum and villainy. Yet it’s pretty amusing sometimes to see what goes on in the biggest trading hub in the EVE universe. You can see lots of things that really make me go like this…

That is, if I were playing Star Trek: Online instead of EVE. Ahem.

One thing that I see pretty often is complete fail buy/sell orders. By this I mean orders that don’t make any sense whatsoever. One example is the market for Iteron IIIs. There are a couple of people there that are selling Iteron IIIs for 600 million ISK, when the going price is about 800,000. I mean, I can imagine someone trying to pull the old WoW Auctioneer trick of manipulating the average, but in EVE you get charged a broker fee based on the total value of the order, and this fee cannot be totally removed even with max skills. At the default 1%, this makes it 3 million ISK just to put up that order, which will never ever be filled because there’s a heck of a lot of zeros in 600 million.

Another kind of complete fail would be people who seem to forget whether they are buying or selling. At least, that’s the only explanation I can come up with when I see orders such as the one in the screenshot below.

Note the buy order set up with a price that’s 0.01 ISK lower than the dominant sell order. I mean, wow, either this guy REALLY wanted to save that 0.01 ISK per implant, or he put up a buy order when he was intending to put up a sell order. Which is quite hard to do, given that you go through a completely different process for each (click “Place buy order” vs right-clicking on item and selecting “Sell this item”). One possibility is that he started making a buy order, got distracted by “ooo pizza is here” and came back and thought he was putting up a sell order. In either case, he made me very happy. His order was originally for 12 implants, I had 6 up for sale near that price so I just modified my order to match his and -CHACHING- instant sale for me.

There’s also been some pretty weird pricing strategies that certain people like to use. There’s a certain trader who likes to trade in some of the same items that I do. Initially I thought that he was just undercutting/overbidding by random amounts, compared to the more common 0.01/1/1000/nice round number folks. One day, however, it struck me in a flash.

This guy, known as Mr 1111 among me and my wife, likes to beat other orders by 111111.11 or some such. He always puts up orders for 10 items, and adds a 1 to every digit of the dominant order. Sometimes he doesn’t add to every digit, e.g. he only starts from the 3rd or 4th instead of the 1st. So if your buy order is 6,524,921.13 ISK, he will change his order to be 6,635,032.24 ISK.

Now this is pretty painstaking effort, especially when you have to do it for every single buy/sell order for many items. Granted it’s not exactly hard arithmetic, but it’s a hell of a lot harder than just changing the last digit. At first I thought he might be using a bot and didn’t want to look too obvious, but then I noticed that sometimes he made math errors >.<

Now, he has to somehow believe that he's at an advantage by doing this. There are only 2 possible advantages to undercutting/overbidding by more than 0.01 ISK.

First, they think it prevents other people from undercutting/overbidding your own order. I've previously mentioned how misguided this is, since obviously if a profit of X amount is acceptable to them it's likely that someone else out there will happily take X-0.01. This is going to hold true until the margins are so small that it's not worth the 100 ISK to modify the order. In any case, attempting to prevent people from undercutting is like attempting to stop aging by not breathing. Mr 1111 should know, since I and many others happily undercut him instantly whenever we happen to check our orders. You'd think he'd realise this by now, but nope he still happily continues 11111ing. "It works, I swear!"

The second part is that people often think that better price = larger volume. Often they cite Walmart's success. However, they don't quite seem to get that it doesn't work that way for everything. Consider a skillbook selling at 7,500,000 ISK. Now someone sets a sell order for 7,450,000 ISK. For this order to sell better than the original 7,500,000 ISK, that must mean that someone out there, who is looking for this skill book, will see the original price and go "Hmm I've been training up to get this skill for about 6 months, but I'm not going to buy it for 7.5M ISK. If it was 7.45M, I'd buy it like a shot. As it is, I'll go train Diplomacy V instead!" Yeah, I don't think so. Especially not for something like a skillbook, which is pretty much a one-time purchase. A good price isn't going to entice me to buy Large Autocannon Specialization if I have no intention to use battleship-class T2 autocannons.

Sadly, now I’m seeing a few other people try to use his 1111 strategy. Proof that idiocy is contagious.

There are also the people who put absolutely HUMONGOUS orders. Like for 200 of an item that has a daily region-wide volume of 50. This would be ok if they intend to just leave the order for a couple of weeks, but nope. These people check their order like once every hour. Here’s a tip: if you’re going to be checking your order all the time, you can make do with a smaller one. That way, you retain some flexibility in case the market changes drastically, without being tied to the broker fee for that humongous order. A gigantic order also tells everyone in the market “Hey guys, you better undercut me if you want your own orders to be filled anytime before Christmas”.