I've created a Monster.

Of my Citadel tenants there is one who has displayed a potential blood lust, lamenting with me about missed opportunities to persecute explorers fitted with warp core stabilizers. We've all been there. You bookmark a system and lay in wait like a good trap door spider, see a potential victim wander in, set up a warp in for tackle, uncloak at point blank range and scram your target, only to see it align and warp away. Which is why Night Fever works so efficiently.

So I shared my fit with my tenant, not really expecting anything to come of it. It is, after all, a significant investment for a very specialized purpose. Some days later, logging in to check on my little empire, I'm greeted with excitement and a kill mail...

Wingspan had a crack at the explorer just before hand and were brought undone by the warp core stabilizers, so they get a consolation prize and appear on the kill mail too, but let's hope this is just the first of many sacrifices made to Bob by the latest scourge of the Universe and Blood Priest of Bob, Zebuhla.

Fit for Porpoise

With the update to Singularity curiosity got the better of me so I logged in to look at the newest addition to the ORE fleet of boosting vessels, the Porpoise. It's a ship that should be of particular interest to wormhole residents not just for its boosting properties, but because it can take advantage of frigate sized wormholes and the ores and ices that lay within.

The new feature of interest however, is the range bonus it receives to medium remote shield transporters.They can stretch their effectiveness to well beyond thirty kilometers and when your boosts have a range of about twenty five, it's perfectly suited for keeping your mosquito mining fleet alive.

Used in a shattered wormhole system that only allows the passage of frigates and destroyers it adds a layer of survivability to otherwise low hanging fruit. Of course, the ship laying down the shield reps had better have survivability itself or it's all for nothing. In keeping with that thought, I came up with this.

Set up as a mining fleet booster and logistics platform it's actually pretty durable. With the afterburner going it's able to maintain a capacitor level of around 40% as long as you have cap booster charges. Importantly, it has 64,000 EHP with which to sustain incoming fire. With a flight of five medium drones it's not totally unable to defend itself either, put a drone damage amplifier on there and the DPS goes up to over 200. Enough to make any frigate take note. It's still going to fall, make no mistake, but coupled with a pair of well tanked Procurers it could be a hell of a job and the outlay of ISK required will not be so steep as to make it an unacceptable risk.

I'm quite certain that someone enterprising is already developing a bait version of this ship with some sort of absurd shield recharge tank; I'm looking at you, Trinkets. You take the bait and suddenly a swarm of small shield tanked ships are upon you, getting combat boosts from the bait you've bitten, just to rub some salt in the wound. Should make for some pretty decent lol-mails. =]

A Fitting Title

There's a lot of significant change coming to Eve next month and I'm yet to find a single instance where CCP might have over reached. Alpha Clone states promise to bring more people to the universe, off grid boosts will be a thing of the past, industrialists will get their buildy buildings, Rorquals can no longer hide impervious to raiders and it would seem the days of the Eve Fitting Tool and the Python Fitting Assistant are numbered. The in game fitting window is nothing short of brilliant, allowing a pilot to experiment with all manner of fittings for ships they fly and even ones they can't. Citadels get the treatment, too. It's beautifully designed and, from my rather cursory examination of it, not at all buggy.

It's not going to mean those other fitting tools won't have a use, of course. They can, after all, be used out of game and this one cannot. It certainly makes your average Joe far less reliant on out of game tools though.

Anyway, it's on Singularity now so do yourself a favour and check it out.

A Miner Problem

The recent DevBlog regarding the various changes to mining makes for some interesting reading. As a reasonably enthusiastic miner in my early days I have pretty well developed skills in mining that I haven't taken serious advantage of in years, so it's fair to say the changes have got me intrigued. And I really like the direction that CCP are taking, too. It's clear CCP want to bring the risk back to mining as the mining barge and exhumer overhaul of the past made under used mining platforms virtually invulnerable and far more effective at extracting resources. It effectively killed the annual Hulkageddon event as no one bothered to use a Hulk anymore with the Skiff being only marginally less efficient but next to ungankable in HiSec space. As someone who reveled in blapping unsuspecting Hulks mining AFK in HiSec regions, this was a massive disappointment.

There's an awful lot covered in the DevBlog but one thing caught my eye in particular. The Porpoise. The name gives it away as a smaller version of the Orca and, in keeping with ORE design, the Primae hull was an obvious choice. The fact they have given it the sort of mass that it can traverse a frigate sized wormhole is telling. Now those lucrative shattered wormhole systems that spawn NullSec ice and ore will have a dedicated hauler/booster to assist in a mining operation. I wrote about this conundrum some time ago, finding a solution in the form of an unscannable, off grid Command Destroyer, but with offgrid links no longer being a thing, the Porpoise is a timely addition. I suspect Noobman, the Wormhole representative CSM, had a fair bit to do with this addition and I'm pretty happy I gave him my vote now.

The bonuses of the ship are interesting. Much like an Orca, only slightly less effective in the boosting role, but with the interesting addition of a 400% bonus to the range of medium remote shield boosters. A decent sized fleet of shield tanked Prospect or Endurance frigates, backed up with Shield links and remote shield reps, would be a tough nut to crack for a small gang. Moreover, the Porpoise itself looks to have a pretty capable tank, enabling the remote reps to stay on the field long enough to allow the fleet members to escape as you'll no doubt see yourself called primary. Of course, in an Orca that'd be the sort of loss you couldn't possibly countenance, but the Porpoise is going to have a value of around sixty million ISK, so a degree of risk is certainly worth it for the occasional loss you might sustain.

Now, I love what CCP are trying to do here. A well organised mining outfit could see itself as very defendable. The sheer amount of Drone DPS would make any small gang nervous. Indeed, if it became popular enough you might see Wormholers fitting smart bombs in their utility high slots to deal with the drone threat effectively; but there's the rub. Will it be popular?

That question can best be answered by examining the nature of the lion's share of miners. It's far from being scientific, but my experience has been that they are rarely wolves in sheep's clothing, they're just sheep. I can count on one finger the amount of times I've lost a ship to a mining fleet and it was only because we were in Brave Newbies space, horribly outnumbered and they knew we were coming and had time to have Rapier tackle on the field for when we inevitably dropped in on their mining operation. RIP Confessor. Every other time I've caught a group of miners with their pants down it's resulted in their demise.

I truly hope I'm wrong. I think it'd be great for the game if we saw large groups of miners venturing into dangerous space with nothing more than their mining lasers and enormous balls, I just can't see it happening. Even so, the Porpoise is a great addition for Wormholers in particular and will make fuel production without the reliance of K-Space an actual reality, as opposed to the purely theoretical one it has been, to date.

Dirty Deeds

There's been a decent amount of concern over on the Eve Forums that the F2P option will fill the server not with new players, but with existing players making HiSec travel even more dangerous with a swag of ganking alts that cost them nothing to train. It's a fair argument too, when you look at the capabilities of a Gallente Alpha Clone in a gank Catalyst destroyer.

In the past I've organised a few gank ops in and around Osmon with my Corporation mates targeting Marauders and other Faction Battleships. For the most part we weren't too fussy and didn't scan our targets to see if they were using expensive modules, we just wanted to piss in someone's cornflakes. Of course, being HiSec, we got our fair share of very shiney kill mails and made the experience ISK positive very comfortably. I don't recall the exact numbers, but I seem to remember the initial outlay for about thirty fitted gank Cataylsts cost about 300 million ISK and the returns were several times that number, not to mention the "luls" that you just can't put a number on.

It's also fair to assume that HiSec suicide ganking isn't typically the domain of people new to the Eve universe, so the concerns being voiced are certainly justified. New players, bless their unjaded, idealistic souls, are ignorant to the the cunty tactics that are employed every day in New Eden.

That said, does it make any difference at all to a bitter vet if the game is F2P?  Unlikely. We still have skills we want to train, advancements we want to make and to be able to enjoy those skills to the best of our abilities. What F2P does enable is those players who, for whatever reason, aren't able to maintain a subscription, maintain a useful presence.

More importantly, it's an entirely legitimate way to make a living. In a previous posts I wrote about ratting as a good option for an Alpha Clone player, but suicide ganking, if you can manage good target selection, would do the job just fine. Anyone with the intent could easily make enough ISK to buy a PLEX every month. If it has to be at the expense of another player then so be it, I say. Just think of it as an Eve Survival Tax. If you want Eve to survive, you need these guys to subscribe.

You Jammy Bastard

Continuing on with the theme of useful Alpha Clone pilots, I'm turning my attention to eWar. Specifically, ECM and Sensor Damps as Tracking Disruptors and Target Painters aren't even nearly as widely used. You could make an argument for an Arbitrator as a Energy Neutralizing loadout, but it'll be fragile as fuck and get primaried off the field in nothing flat. At least with ECM or Damps you can actually force your quarry to disengage almost instantly and use range to your advantage.

The frigate options are probably not worth discussing at length, it's not rocket science how to fit them and they're very squishy in a fire fight, so yeah, I'll leave that to your imagination. When it comes to the Cruiser hull options of the Blackbird and Celestis however, things are looking up.

The Blackbird has long been the go-to poverty pack, throw away eWar boat of Eve and is as hated today as it's ever been, consistently seeing it called primary the moment it appears. Frankly, if you're rocking ECM, expect to be shot at and probably trolled in local. That's your lot in life. The key is to surviving the initial contact long enough to land your jams and disrupt their own eWar so your DPS boats can deal some damage. Sometimes it goes great, sometimes not. But even with a shitty Alpha clone pilot, you can be that guy. That really, really annoying guy.

Compared to a max skilled Falcon pilot, it's not terribly impressive. Your range is only about 36km's but you have a whopping 41km's of falloff to retreat into. But where it's really let down compared to a well skilled pilot is in the jam strength, roughly one third the strength of a Falcon, depending on how you fit it. Which of course means you have to overheat your jams before landing and pick on Tech 1 ships for the most part. You'll need a fair degree of good fortune to jam out anything Tech II or Tech III, so know your limits. With the prop mod off you can keep your jams going for about seven minutes which is probably about 6 minutes longer than you'll live, so you may as well just keep that MWD running and pull as much range as you can. The 23K or so of EHP you have might just buy you an extra minute, you never know, right?

The Celestis, I think, is a better option. Not only are they not so universally despised as the ECM Ships, they've got a full wing of medium drones to send out and deal a little damage. In much the same style as the Blackbird above, the guns are for decoration more than anything, a little self defence from a tackle frigate that gets too close, that's about it. The value is in the damps though and the whole fit is geared around putting as much sensor disruption on the field as possible.

Sensor damps are so useful in so many roles and it's a big reason why I prefer them to ECM, other than the obvious one of not being reflexively shot at by literally everyone. Do you have a problem with a kiting Orthrus? Damps. Falcon jamming everyone from 50km's? Damps. Logistics wing staying out of reach? Damps. Pretty much anything? Damps. Damps. Damps. Jack of all trades eWar and with a useful, if not impressive, 29K of EHP.

Now I'm not going to pretend these are good options, they're serviceable, at best. The point is to give your F2P members a sense of value to the fleet. Give them a taste of what PvP is like, pretty soon they'll get the hunger to fly some of the shiney shit you take on roams and before you know it you've got a useful guy in your Corporation that was just making up the numbers before. It's what you want, it's what CCP wants and hell, isn't more people to shoot at what we all want?

Turning Shit into Clay

I'm a big fan of Eve going free to play. They've got a tremendous mechanism in place to sustain their income over and above that of subscriptions and considering how many of the long term players can sustain themselves without paying a subscription, anything that brings more people to the universe is a good thing.

If you've been reading my blog a while you know I play World of Warships quite a lot, too. My affection for it has a lot to do with my time in the Navy but had it not been free to play I probably would never have tried it. Since being cast under its spell I've spent money on it for several premium ships and I'll continue to do so as long as War Gaming continue to deliver a great product. There are those in the community that are proud of the fact that they haven't spent a dollar on it and I understand there are circumstances where it might be difficult for some, but really, I see them as free loaders. If the developer has made something you enjoy, the honourable thing to do would be to reward them for it. That said, it's a reality in World of Warships and it will no doubt be a reality in Eve, too. The question is, how do you get the most out of your F2P members?

In PvP scenarios, five million skill points doesn't give you a lot of options. Whilst you may have the skills to fly a Navy Cruiser, you're far from efficient in it and a liability to your fleet. Being able to put out enough DPS, apply it to your target efficiently, sustain the incoming damage and manage your capacitor levels just isn't effective in a cruiser hull with only the five million skills points in the captain's skull. So what use are they?

A well put together fleet has several arms. You have your scouts, followed by your damage dealers who are ably backed up by the logistics wing; but all of those are jobs for well skilled pilots. What remains is fast tackle and eWar. I'll save the eWar discussion for another time as it's significantly more involved than fast tackle. So let's talk Tier 1 interceptors.

Survivability isn't high on the agenda here. It's more about landing on the target your scout has found, tackling it so it can't warp away and lasting long enoough for the heavy hitters to land on field, secure secondary tackle and maybe just warp out before being popped. You can't disregard tank, of course, but with limited skill points to play with it's more about speed and evasive maneuvering. As your survival rate isn't high, you must keep the fittings very cost effective also.

The obvious choice, for me at least, is the Condor. It has long been one of my favourite T1 frigates for it's outrageous speed and ability to apply its damage at long ranges. It is the poor man's interceptor and, I believe, fills the role as Alpha Tackle better than any other race.

Very fast, able to reach 4,400 m/s with overheat, able to apply [miserly] damage to target whilst kiting, a 24 km point, and nimble enough to chase down almost anything that isn't an Interceptor. You could of course swap out the Thermal Amplifier for a Target Painter, but it's a drain on Capacitor and you really don't want your foot off the throttle in this ship. Importantly, it's also entirely disposable, you could have a hundred of these occupying your shared ships hangar and not even give a damn. Now the several Alpha clone pilots in your fleet are no longer a liability, but an integral part of the success of your gang. Keep pilots engaged with roles like that and you never know, they might even pony up for a subscription.