Somber Industries Response To Iskbank.com Scandal

On Saturday Massively.com's Eve Online columnist Brendan Drain published an interview with SOMBER.blink's Somerset Mahm about the site.  Since the interview was conducted before Brendan knew about the latest revelations about the Iskbank.com RMT scandal broken by Eve News24, he arranged for Somerset Mahm to address the issue in the comments.

"Re: the RMT issues that have recently cropped up. Blink takes an active stance on trying to combat RMT. We don't allow you to cash out Blink credit (the easiest way to quickly launder ISK), you have to play your credit on the site. We also don't allow transfer of credit between accounts-- even though this feature has been requested and we'd love to implement it. We are, from what I understand, audited fairly closely by CCP because of the sheer amount of ISK that runs through Blink. Because ISK goes into Blink and back out to the same person, not a different player, this immediately defeats much of the potential for laundering-- the transactions are still linked to the player that was holding the bought ISK to begin with.

"I filed petitions as soon as the recent events came to light, and did receive GM responses although they could not confirm what actions will be taken. Several accounts will be removed from the site as it does appear that they have been permanently banned. [emphasis mine]

"At the most pragmatic level, however, there is little we can do other than cooperate fully with CCP. We receive no special insight as to the source of ISK and we have no CCP-Batphone to use. Rest assured that we're 100% against the practice of RMT, as it kills the game we love."

So it appears that CCP is going through the copy of the database that Eve News24 provided the makers of my favorite game and are applying the Banhammer.

Another RMT Scandal In Eve - Fanfest Should Be Fun This Year

Eve News 24 is known for its anti-RMT (real money transfer) stance and scored another coup when it obtained access to a copy of Iskbank.com's transactions data base going back to April 2010.  The latest Eve News 24 RMT expose has gained coverage in such mainstream MMO websites as Massively, Slashdot, MMORPG and Ten Ton Hammer.  CCP is going to announce their latest actions and plans in the fight against RMT at Fanfest in a couple of weeks.

To make things even more interesting, CCP announced yesterday that EVE TV will be covering Fanfest again on March 25-26, with an estimated 18 hours of coverage.  I'll be working on that Friday so I really hope the information is televised in an event on Saturday.  CCP is usually pretty good about posting these types of things on its YouTube! channel, but I would really like to see the event live.  Heck, I may even hook the laptop up to my big screen TV to watch.  Then again, CCP Soundwave on a 61" screen?  Maybe not a good idea.

T2 Production: Remember To Make Notes

One of the things I discovered last night is that I need to take better notes about what I am doing in my T2 production.  Fortunately I discovered my mistake when creating T2 blueprint copies of drones instead of ships.

According to the formula in the Evelopedia article on invention, the most production runs I can expect from a T2 BPC of a drone like a Warrior II is 10 if I do not use an encrypter to enhance my invention run.  Also, if I understand the math correctly, the BPC produced will have 1/10th the number of runs that were on the input blueprint copy.  So in order to produce a Warrior II BPC with 10 runs, the input Warrior I BPC needs to have 100 runs on it.

I think I proved that in reality.  The first time I made Warrior II blueprints, I used Warrior I blueprint copies that had 100 runs on them and my output blueprint copies had 10 runs.  Last night, I used Warrior I blueprint copies that only contained 10 runs, and as expected according to the math, I produced Warrior II blueprints with only 1 run on them.  Ouch!

Needless to say, I am now writing down everything I am doing concerning T2 production, because mistakes are expensive.  I am also going to take the rest of those 10-run Warrior I blueprints and use them to manufacture drones.  I might as well get some use out of them since I can't use them to make T2 blueprints.

But all is not doom and gloom in my tech 2 ship building program.  So far this week I have produced 1 Mastodon blueprint copy and 3 Prowler blueprint copies.  Combined with the 2 Cheetah blueprint copies I already invented, I'm pretty happy with the way my plans are progressing.  But before advancing any farther, I am going to wait until the weekend when I have time to do a bit more research to make sure I didn't miss any important facts about the process.  After all, building internet spaceships is serious business!

Epic Forum Posts

Official forums often have a bad reputation as places sane players should fear to go.  But since my sanity is in question (I am a hauler pilot, after all) I visit the official forums anyway.  Last night I found two threads worth noting.

The first thread comes from the RIFT forums.  After you read this thread, you'll almost never have to read another thread in any game again.  This was the opening post:

Rambling description of my MMO gaming experience that dates back to Meridian59 all through every MMO ever developed. Intent is to establish myself as an "expert" in MMO design and management giving the following outlandish statements I'm about to make credibility.

Positive sandwich talking about the things that the game does well, then placing a game breaking negative that must be changed or the game fails, followed by a reiteration of the previous positive comments. Insert vague references to supposed facts supported by fabricated statistics.

Conclude post with a dire warnings of inevitable doom should said changes not be made, up to and including cancelation of accounts from the entire European Union. Include link for details to sign online petition.

Signed,

Forum Troll 

On page 15 a fourth Trion employee, a developer, jumps into the fun...

Standard reply talking about the various ways to alleviate 'game breaking negative'. Include list of well liked features not related to original complaint.

Reveal that we also share some of the same opinion but must think of the well being of the players as a whole. Tell of own personal experiences within the game to provide a personal connection to both the player and other readers.

Conclude post with exclamation that company is very passionate about important issues. Thank Forum Troll for being as passionate about game as we are.

Signed

Random Developer

Definitely an epic post and a must read since almost all of the posters joined into the spirit of the thread.  But not totally all-inclusive.  Over in the Eve Online forums something funny happened.  Someone made the 47,378th post in the Crime & Punishment forums asking the denizens there why they play the way they do.  (For those who don't know, C&P is known as the home of pirates, mercs, and griefers.)  The thread turned into a tribute to Queen, twisting into a parody song at the end.  For those that just want to see the final composed lyrics, Ignition SemperFi compiled all the contributions into one post.  If I could sing, I'd sing the song myself.

Cheetahs Are Cooler Than Turtles

No, the title does not refer to animals.  In both RIFT and Eve Online I spent a lot of time this weekend traveling in each game.  In RIFT I was constantly traveling back and forth either doing quests or chasing after rifts or invasions.  Doing the quests and invasions are pretty cool, but I really hate the travel on the back of the turtles I received for purchasing the Digital Collector's Edition of the game.  If I just do a short burst, then stay in one spot for 15-20 minutes, the travel doesn't bother me.  But when I have to travel for 60 seconds every five minutes?  Ugh!

Not so in Eve.  I was a week overdue collecting all of my data cores from my research agents spread out across New Eden, so I jumped in a Cheetah covert ops ship (because one of the agents is in low-sec) and made the 80+ jump circuit to visit them all.  I don't travel AFK, so I was at the controls during the entire journey, only taking breaks when I reached a station.  I actually find the 90 minute trip rather peaceful.  I just put on a podcast and enjoy the scenery.  Of course, New Eden being New Eden, things aren't all that peaceful.  Someone managed to aggro the gate guns at one of the high-sec gates.  And I'm not sure why at a couple of gates pilots had drones deployed, especially when they didn't have any corp mates with them.  Watching how people behave at gates is one of the things that makes long distance travel in Eve interesting.

TL;DR - One minute on the back of a turtle, bad.  90 minutes in a Cheetah, good.

RIFT Patches March 4-5

The team at Trion really doesn't believe in letting problems linger in RIFT.  The last two days have seen two more hotfixes deployed.  The fixes are coming so fast I had to go to RiftWire to get the notes on hotfix 4.  The notes from hotfix 5 come from the launcher.


Hotfix #4:

• Fixed an economy bug involving the Runebreaking ability.

DUNGEONS AND RAIDS

• Greenscale’s Blight: Lockout timer has been changed from 3 days to 1 week.
• Players can no longer reset Expert or Raid instances that are locked to their party.
• Increased the bonus granted by Hit and Focus against Expert Dungeon and Raid mobs.
• Increased the Dodge and Resistances of Expert Dungeon and Raid mobs.

Hotfix #5

* Removed the 'turtle costume' left over on mounted characters whose turtle mount entitlements were removed for the end of head start.
* Tracking abilities no longer trigger global cooldown, which also reduces their effect on Rift contribution.
* Konstantin will no longer be tricked into respawning after being killed.
* Opening a received mail will not start the 3 day expiration timer.
* Mail containing account-level entitlement rewards will not expire.

My First T2 Ship BPC

Although I am writing a lot about RIFT, if I only have time to play one game in a night, that game is still Eve Online.  Last night is a good example.  After doing the maintenance on my planetary interaction colonies for the evening, I shifted into tech 2 production mode.  I am still in the process of creating tech 2 blueprint copies and the first ones rolled out of the labs last night.

I was attempting to turn copies of 5 Probe blueprints into Cheetah blueprints.  I had heard that the success rate for this is around 25% unless additional components are added to the invention process that I did not add.  When I finished my PI activity, I still had 30 minutes to wait before I knew the results of my invention attempts.  So what did I do?  Went out and bought more blueprints that I could copy, of course!

Since one of my goals is to own every sub-capital Minmatar ship, I decided I will make all the tech 2 frigates instead of purchasing them on the open market.  So I did a quick search and purchased the blueprints for the Slasher, Breacher, and Rifter and started the copy process.  When the copying is finished in about 2 weeks (yes, I'm using public copying facilities) I can attempt to make BPCs for the Jaguar, Wolf, Claw, Stiletto and Hound.  I also went out and purchased a copy of Frigate Construction, because I saw that I need that trained up to III in order to make these ships.  What about Vigil blueprints?  Well, who really flies the Hyena anyway?  Although who knows?  Maybe I can sell some to the anti-ganker squads when Hulkageddon V rolls around this summer.

Once I got everything squared away, I still had to wait 5 minutes for the invention jobs to finish.  If the weather outside just included a bit of snow, it would have felt like Christmas.  And when I got to open my presents, I found that two of the five invention jobs suceeded.  So I am now the proud owner of 2 Cheetah 1-run blueprint copies.


I have plenty of blueprint copies I can play with while I wait for the frigate blueprints to finish copying.  Next up is a ship I really want: the Mastodon.  I started up 5 invention jobs to create Mastodon BPCs and I'll know Sunday whether I succeeded or not.

Hmmm ... Mastodons.  And if I can make them, I can afford to lose one.  And I've really been curious to see how they perform in low-sec.  This could lead to further adventures.  Aren't sandboxes great?

Six Slot Bags

Sometimes switching between a science fiction game like Eve Online and a fantasy MMO like RIFT produces a bit of culture shock.  Take, for instance, item space.  In my 18 months of experience playing Eve, I have never run out of space for my stuff.  Not so in any of the fantasy MMORPGs I've played, and RIFT is no exception.

Part of the attraction of purchasing the collector's edition was that it came with a 24 slot bag.  Was it worth $10 extra to get a 24 slot bag and a 60% speed travel mount for every character I create.  Hell yes!  But each character in RIFT can carry 5 bags, so upgrading those slots with the biggest bags I can find is a priority in every game I play.

Now, the NPC vendors I've found in RIFT sell players 6 slot bags for the low, low price of 23 gold pieces and some change.  Now that is an incentive to start up the manufacturing profession of Outfitting if I've ever seen one.  (Okay, I don't really need an excuse to craft, but that's my story and I'm sticking to it.)

To create a six slot bag in RIFT requires an Outfitter skill of 30, 7 bolts of burlap and 5 coarse thread.  The thread is purchased from an NPC vendor for 20 silver pieces each.  The burlap?  Burlap drops from humanoid mobs.  That's right, no boring harvesting; just go out and kill stuff!  (Note to Eve players: harvesting in RIFT is a lot more exciting that mining, so it's boring to everyone but us).

Making bolts of burlap requires two pieces of burlap to make.  So not only does making bolts help level your Outfitting skills, it helps free up bag space until you can start making bigger bags.  And if you really want to create a basic crafter that produces something besides bags, just add the runescrafting and butchering professions.  That way, you can make the items required to get your Outfitting skills up to 30, then use the runesbreaking skill to break down the item you just made into components to level the Runescrafting skill.  And Butchering?  Some items for Outfitting require the Butchering skill on certain types of dead mobs to obtain.  Yes, more killing!

Last night I made 3 six slot bags and need to make 5 more for the two characters I currently have and another 4 bags for the last character I plan to create this weekend.  That's a lot of mobs I need to kill to get the burlap to drop, but given the quest system in RIFT, I don't really have to go out of my way to find them.

A Crafter's Journey

I've traveled a long winding course in my MMORPG crafting career since I first put hammer to anvil in World of Warcraft's village of Goldshire back in 2005 to make a pair of boots.  I guess I really love crafting, or perhaps was fortunate that I grew bored of WoW, because WoW's crafting system did not turn me off of crafting totally.  I didn't really mind the system that let me gather a bunch of materials, then park my toon at the forge and click the create all button.  After all, that was a great time to get up and get a soda and fix a sandwich.  For me, the trick to making crafting interesting was figuring out how to gather the materials I needed to make the items.

WoW's crafting system did have two major drawbacks when I played the game back during the vanilla days of 2005-2006.  The first is that a character's crafting level was tied to his/her adventure level.  Ugh!  The second was that to get to max level in your profession basically required raiding?  Really?  I never understood why a crafter could not just concentrate on his craft and had to adventure.

2006 came along and after 9 months of wandering Azeroth I was so sick of WoW that I swore off all MMOs.  That lasted approximately one month when I heard about another game called EverQuest 2 that was allegedly much better.  So I bought the game and found out EQ2 was better than WoW.  One of the things that made EQ2 better was the crafting system.  First off, I could have one character harvest all the types of crafting materials.  Next, crafting ability was not tied to adventure level.  Yay!  So I could concentrate on adventuring with my ranger and crafting with my army of crafting alts.  And I had crafting alts.  By the time I left the game in 2009, I had reached the level cap of 80 in all 9 crafting professions.

The other thing that made EQ2's crafting system better than WoW's was the crafting mini-game in which a crafter basically plays whack-a-mole to create an item.  Crafting actually involves skill and hand-eye coordination.  Then hire a talented game developer like Emily "Domino" Taylor to evolve this system further by creating tradeskill writs, crafting instances and crafting quests and SOE had (and still has) a crafting system that arguably is the best in the industry.  Domino is still my favorite game dev of all time.

But all was not right in Norrath for me.  After 3 years of crafting, I started to suffer pain in my left hand from all the button pressing involved in crafting.  Another problem was the cost of EQ2.  In order to have 9 crafters on my account, I had to subscribe to the SOE Station Pass.  When I began playing, the character limit per account was 6 (later changed to 7).  But by ordering Station Pass, I got an extra 4 (later 5) character slots.  Hence the crafting army.  But Station Pass did not have any discount plans for ordering more than one month at a time.  Boo!

Paying extra was okay when SOE games were the only ones I played, but in 2009 I became interested in another game, Eve Online.  I had heard about the game, but I didn't really become interested until the fall of the Band of Brothers alliance and listening to Dianabolic and The Mittani battle it out on The Funky Bacon Show on Eve Radio.  I finally took the plunge into New Eden in August of 2009 and liked what I saw.  With my guild breaking up, combined with the next EQ2 expansion, Sentinel's Fate, coming out in February 2010 instead of November 2009, I made the move to New Eden full time in October 2009.

Eve Online was an eye-opener as a crafter.  Eve has a reputation as tough, and if you want to really play in the big leagues in the best MMO economy, New Eden is the place to play.  A person just can't jump into manufacturing.  In order for making my own products to even make financial sense, I had to learn a lot of skills.  In space, a character can't just wield a pick-axe.  No, in the year YC113, you need specialized mining ships to obtain ore and the skills to fly them properly.  A proper industrial carebear also needs skills to exploit planets of raw materials and the ability to process those materials into products to sell or use in further manufacturing processes.  The budding industrialist also needs a network of research agents and the skills to invent things.  And perhaps most importantly of all, the industrialist needs the start-up isk to make everything possible.

After 18 months of not making much more than ammunition and drones, I'm finally ready for the big time.  That's right, tech 2 production.  I've got colonies on 10 worlds in 5 systems in two constellations.  I've got a network of research agents that reaches out across 4 regions.  I have an industrial command ship that greatly expands my mining capability for the more common ores and a small flotilla capable of smashing level 4 missions in order to gain the more uncommon ones.  I've got the skills to make blueprint copies and shortly will have the skills and basic tools to make tech 2 ships.

In short, I'm about to reach the pinnacle of my MMO crafting career and guide a force of literally thousands of non-capsuleers in creating some of the most complex and awesome items in the MMO world.  And then CCP comes out with the character creator in Incursions as a prelude to Incarna. I had a great time making my characters, but as I picked out the clothing, I looked at the choices and said to myself ...

"I hate those boots.  I wish I could make my own."

I now have the urge to actually get my hands dirty again in addition to directing a vast enterprise from a pod full of goo.  So where can I make a pair of boots?  RIFT.

Yes, RIFT harkens back to those days of old where I collected a bunch of materials, stood by a crafting station and then left to go make a sandwich.  But the boots are much better looking and useful.  Also, because RIFT just launched yesterday, not a lot of information exists on exactly how to do everything.  So I'm trying to figure out the best combinations of professions for the three Guardian characters I plan on creating in order to streamline my supply chain.  After all, sending things via the mail system costs money.  And I'm not really sure what I can make or how valuable crafting really is at the higher levels.

I've had a blast as a crafter over these last 6 years.  I think I'm just about where I really want to be.  After all, doesn't everyone want to have an empire, even if it pales in comparison to many around you?  And don't many successful people just putter around with some of the simpler things they did when first starting out?  Right now, I fit that description.

Late Night Rift Patch - February 28

The RIFT official launch is today and last night the dev team launched one last patch.  I'm not sure exactly how I like this policy of patching the game at any time.  Maybe the practice will end once the official launch hits.  But for now, here are the notes I found on my launcher.

GENERAL GAMEPLAY
* Ancient Wardstone area quests now automatically shut down one hour after completion or failure. You will need to use your Ascended Power to reactivate the wardstone.
* Fixed a bug with last login time not saving correctly for guild members. The existing display will be updated the next time a guild member logs in.


CULT SAGA
* Forces of the Plane of Death: Changed to require sealing of any Death Rift in Freemarch for updates.
* The Means of the Endless: Drop rate of the Attunement Shard increased to 100% from the Endless Nightbringer.
* Follow That Gnar: The Gnar should be easier to follow, and not disappear from the path.


ZONES

DROUGHTLANDS
* A Hymn of Frost and Flame: Enkarus Scourge mobs spawned during this quest no longer give experience or loot.

STILLMOOR
* Past is Prologue: Quest can now be completed normally by all Guardian players.


WARFRONTS
* There is now a shorter AFK timer for Warfronts, and players exceeding it will be immediately kicked out.
* The Black Garden: Holding the Fang while on the 'ledge' of your respective faction starting area will award fewer points.
* The Codex: Players should no longer be able to get into the Vault through clever jumping.


CLIENT/SERVER
* Reporting spam will now also automatically ignore the the sender.