Christmas in Ani: The Bonus Room

After salvaging as much of the situation as possible following the Christmas Eve battle rescuing the InterBus passengers, it was time to go to work.  Time to buy a new Maelstrom but, more importantly, time to review the tactics and fittings I had used over the last few months. 

My two-pilot gang always works best when moving fast and engaging in hit-and-run tactics, but I had looked at others fittings without taking into account the tactics I wanted to use.  This was especially true of Wandering Rose's command Hurricane.  I call it that because she fits a gang link in one of the highs to improve the shield tanks I favor while running missions.  She didn't even fit an afterburner on her ship, limiting the combined fleet speed in missions down to 197 m/sec.  Rosewalker's ship was perhaps in worse shape.  While those who post on BattleClinic may favor high dps setups, I favor those that allow me to escape with my ship.  And despite all the errors I made against the Sansha in Nakugard, if Rosewalker's battleship had fitted a Damage Control II, the ship would have escaped.  Probably trailing flames, but essentially in one piece.

The first thing I did was research fittings for the new Maelstrom.  I decided on making two fittings I could swap between, one for artillery and another for autocannons.  After doing some research I settled on the Eve University fitting for PvE Maelstroms.  By fitting the 1200mm Heavy 'Scout' artillery I do less damage, but with around 20,000 more EHP in my tank than the old gank fit, I could hang in the battle longer.  You are not doing damage if you are warping away.  For the autocannon fit I had to replace the Cap Recharger II with a meta level 3 module in order to fit a full rack of 800mm Autocannon IIs.  And by using a Afterburner II, I managed to get my top speed up to 303 m/sec.  I also managed to add 25 seconds to my capacitor when running all modules.

The next item on the agenda was to improve the setup of the command Hurricane.  Not only did it not fit a propulsion module, but it was not cap stable when running the gang link, Invulnerability Field II and Damage Control II.  Sure, it could tank a lot of incoming fire, but it couldn't race out in front of Rosewalker's battleship like the non-command Hurricane could.  The solution proved to be relatively simple.  I replaced the shield hardener in the mid slots with a 10MN Afterburner II and removed a Shield Power Relay II in the lows with a Gyrostabilizer II.  The changes were complete with the addition of a Medium Nosferatu II.  After the changes the ship was cap stable while the afterburner was off but had a 12 minute life with the afterburner on.  The energy vampire allows a recharge of the capacitor, espcially when orbiting  Marchariels.  The big benefit was that with the afterburner on, the 450 m/s top speed lets Wandering Rose speed tank the enemy, especially battleships as she pounds away with her favored 450mm autocannons.

I once heard that after a major loss the best thing to do is keep the troops busy.  So I kept the survivors busy fitting the new Maelstrom and looked for missions so I could perform a live-fire shakedown cruise.  The Krusual security agent Odor Bonnevekin provided a couple of anti-rogue drone missions and a hostage rescue mission.  Apparently the Angel Cartel were behaving themselves, although for once I wasn't complaining about not having any Angels to shoot.  The new fittings and tactics worked well and so did the replacements I hired to fill in the holes in the battleship crew.  After all the hard work, I sent the crews off for liberty to maybe enjoy Christmas.

What is it about 3 o'clock in the morning that demands emergency calls?  Because I received an urgent call from Odor about an impending Angel Cartel attack on Krusual tribe assets in Lanngisi around 3am.  Why me?  But the crews were rounded up from the station and the gang made the jump into the Lanngisi system to face an unknown number of Angel Cartel ships.  On Christmas.  Again.

Apparently news of a capsuleer losing a battleship gets around fast because these Angel Cartel gang leaders really thought they could take me and they wanted to hog all the glory for themselves.  After warping to the bookmark provided by the Krusual agent, I faced piecemeal attacks as I took out first the tacklers, then the battlecruisers and finally the battleships in each small gang I faced.  Based on signals intercepts, I knew which ship held the commander and saved him for last.  The first two deadspace pocket went like that, except that in the second pocket the Angel commander tried to hit me with Thrashers when I entered.  That didn't work too well for him.

Moving quickly, I burned to the acceleration gate and in the third pocket caught an Angel commander in a lone battleship with just missile batteries and sentry guns backing him up.  I took care of those in passing as I moved to the next acceleration gate. The blitz continued as the Angel commander committed his ships piecemeal at the Circus gang instead of holding them together as a single strong body.  In this manner Wandering Rose and Rosewalker destroyed 7 tech 2 frigates, 5 Cyclone battlecruisers, 10 Marchariel battleships and the commander's Thrasher.  An analysis of the Angels signals traffic showed that the forces in this deadspace pocket were commanded by Garin Kezmonu.  While a notable Angel commander, he possessed none of the seniority within the Domination to command a fleet the size encountered so far.  So the gang approached the next acceleration gate and warped.

The fifth deadspace pocket held the Angel commander, Tiogo Kargaz, who was quickly identified due to his sloppy signals security.  With the reason for the poor tactics explained, Wandering Rose and Rosewalker quickly finished off Tiogo's forces.  At this point Odor commed that the mission was successful and to come back to the station.  In 80 minutes of combat the Circus gang had destroyed a total of 97 ships.

But was the mission really over?  One more acceleration gate remained.  The gate was locked, hinting at something important on the other end.  So while Wandering Rose went back to Nakugard and retrieved the Noctis and salvaged the wreckage from the battle, the crew of the Maelstrom examined the acceleration gate to determine how to activate it.  Rosewalker finally discovered the secret and two hours after the battle began, the gang warped in to the last pocket to finish the job.

Rosewalker entered first to draw the incoming fire away from Wandering Rose's smaller Hurricane.  The sight on the overview was daunting as he detected an Angel Battlestation and all the fixed defenses that typically surrounds one.  Up until then Rosewalker had enjoyed the range advantage with his 1200mm guns, but now he was facing cruise missile and sentry gun batteries that greatly outranged his Maelstrom.  The operation turned into a run and hit attack as he used the superior reflexes enjoyed by pod pilots and sped away from the area while pouring fire into the batteries.

The Angel commander, seeing his fixed defenses begin to crumble, sent out his fleet in pursuit and called for the death of Rosewalker.  Two Angel Dramiels, 2 Daredevils, 4 Cynabels, 3 Cyclones and 5 Marchariel raced in pursuit of the fleeting capsuleer.  As the Angels chased Rosewalker, the ships began to clump together by type, Wandering Rose's dropped out of warp and began engaging the frigates.  The initial attack on the station resulted in the destruction of both cruise missile and one of the heavy sentry gun batteries before the pressure of the pursuit forced Rosewalker to turn his guns on the Angel fleet.

While Rosewalker poured fire into the enemy battlecruisers, Wandering Rose engaged in a desperate battle to keep the frigates away from the Maelstrom.  Even with Rosewalker's drones in support, she could only destroy two of the four frigates and the remaining frigates webbed and scrammed the Maelstrom.  At this point in the battle, I knew that I could escape the tackle if I could give my drones enough time to finish the job.  So Wandering Rose broke away from Rosewalker and raced into the middle of the group of Cynabels to try to draw some fire away from the battleship and, more importantly, the drones.  In the meantime, Rosewalker finished off the Cyclones and began firing on the Angel battleships.

Once again, the race was on.  Could I break the tackle before Rosewalker ran out of capacitor.  One of the Angel frigates died in a white flash and then the Marchariels reached autocannon range.  The shield rep pulses on the capsuleer battleship became longer as the damage increased.  At the shields hit 50% I made the sickening discovery that there were no celestial bodies in his flight path to align to.  Any alignment to warp would result in flying into the optimal range of the Angel autocannons, a situation I was desperately attempting to avoid.  Flight was no longer an option.  The choices were now win or die.

When the shields hit 40% Wandering Rose finally killed the last Cynabel and now the Minmatar pilots began focus firing on the incoming battleships.  At 30%, the last frigate died.  Rosewalker fired up the afterburner and began to open the range with the Angel battleships.  At the same time, he finally moved out of range of the sentry guns, thus taking even less damage.

At this point, the battle was essentially won.  As the Angel battleships began dying, the Angel commander belatedly realized the danger and sent out his reserve squad of 5 battleships as reinforcements.  But with the battle occurring over 175km from the battle station, they arrived too late to save their comrades.  Having seen the futility of attempting to destroy the Maelstrom, the new group focused their fire on Wandering Rose's Hurricane.  But with no tackle remaining, the Angel battleships were unable to seriously threaten the battlecruiser.  After a short sharp fight, Wandering Rose and Rosewalker left 5 more wrecks in the pocket and moved on to reduce the battlestation and its remaining defenses to slag.  With the threatened Angel attack utterly defeated, the capsuleers returned to Nakugard.

A Lack of Sympathy

I realize I haven't written about CCP's War On Bots™ in awhile.  That doesn't mean I've changed my mind about botters and how CCP handles them.  So I'll apologize in advance if you get caught for botting or illicit RMT activities and come to my comments, cry about it and I don't offer you any sympathy.  I won't apologize for what I write if you come onto my blog, complain about CCP banning you for no reason and giving you no notice about what they did and then urge people to play another game.

I don't mind criticism of CCP; they have done a lot over the past year to deserve more than I can ever dish out.  But I draw the line when people make stuff up because they don't want to look bad.  Especially if you got caught botting or engaging in RMT.

Chistmas in Ani: No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

For the second year in a row, I managed to lose the most powerful combat ship I could fly over Christmas.  While painful, this year events turned out a lot better than the events of last year.

The events began after the latest Sansha Nation incursion in the Ani constellation.  After the victory of the anti-Incursion fleets, my corporation the Khumaak Flying Circus began operations out of the Nakugard V, Moon 12 station in support of Krusual tribe interests in the constellation.  On 23 December Rosewalker was contacted by Krusual agent Odor Bonnevekin after a Minmatar Republic convoy was ambushed and wiped out by the notorious Angel Cartel fleet commander Hoborak Moon.  The mission was to eliminate the Angel Cartel fleet as a threat, and to terminate Hoborak Moon with extreme prejudice.

The battle began with the standard corporation tactic of warping in Rosewalker in his Maelstrom to draw the attention of the Angel commander while Wandering Rose would follow a minute later with her command Hurricane.  The plan worked, with Rosewalker landing far away from the tackling frigates and led the Angel Cyclones away from Wandering Rose's landing point.  In the wild fight that followed, the Cyclones melted in a withering crossfire but the capsuleers suffered heavy drone losses as the Angels did everything they could to tackle the battleship.  In the end, the Circus gang destroyed the remaining Marcharial/Cynabel force and held the field.

Moving quickly, Wandering Rose moved her gang to the next acceleration gate and warped into the next deadspace pocket, catching the Angel fleet in the pocket without any tackling frigates.  The recent advances in destroyer technology made the Angel Thrashers a primary target in a fight where the crews barely needed to sweat.  By this time the Circus force had the Angel commander off-balance and they warped into the last deadspace pocket a full 50 km from where Hoborak Moon had stationed his Dramiels.  Given the drone losses suffered earlier, the Dramiels could have caused serious problems if they had been stationed in range.  Instead, the tackle did not last long and the mobility of the capsuleer ships was enough to finally put an end to Moon's career.

The intention was to give the crews liberty over the weekend, but that was not to be.  In the early hours of 24 December the government on Nakugard V received a distress call from an InterBus ship carrying passengers coming home for Christmas.  Elements of the Sasha incursion were still in the system and battling with the Angel Cartel.  The InterBus transport was caught in the crossfile and heavily damaged, with its ability to warp destroyed.  Rosewalker took the call, recalling the crews but still leaving the station short-handed.

If the enemy were just the Angel Cartel, the gang would have been okay.  But with Sansha's Nation involved, things got a bit complicated, as Sansha's ships dish out different types of damage.  Ships set up to tank fire from the Angel Cartel are at a disadvantage when facing off against the heavy EMP damage output by the Nation's Nightmares and Succubi.  The problem was compounded by the fact that in the initial engagement with the Sansha forces guarding the acceleration gates to their base that Rosewalker was able to snipe from beyond the effective range of the Sansha forces.  That produced overconfidence that later proved fatal.

Given a choice of attacking an Angel Cartel fleet or anyone else, Wandering Rose will always pick the Angel Cartel.  So after neutralizing the Sansha forces, the Circus gang turned its attention on the Angel forces.  The effect of the loss of  Hoborak Moon the day before was noticeable as Wandering Rose and Rosewalker sliced through the next two deadspace pockets to the damaged Interbus ship like a hot knife through butter.  At this point everything went according to plan.  But as often happens, Wandering Rose became a little too ambitious.  Instead of sticking to the plan, she decided to attempt to wipe out the remnant of the Sansha forces in Nakugard.

The Sansha forces were set up on the exit point waiting on the Circus ships.  The Sansha commander immediately concentrated on Wandering Rose's Hurricane pouring fire into the ship as two tacklers webbed the ship down.  Although the drones were eventually able to destroy the two frigates and the main guns from both ships were able to somewhat reduce the damage coming from the Sansha gang, Wandering Rose was forced to warp off.  In hindsight, Rosewalker should have warped away as well.

Instead, Rosewalker aligned to a planet and decided to punish the Sansha fleet as much as possible.  It could be that Wandering Rose could rejoin him before he was forced to warp out.  Unnoticed in all the fighting was the fact that the Sansha commander had held a third tackling frigate in reserve.  A tackling frigate fitted with a scram, not webbers.  By the time Rosewalker realized his mistake, it was too late.  The battle then became a race between whether Rosewalker's drones could kill the Succubus before the Sansha could kill the Maelstrom.  The anxiety increased as Rosewalker's capacitor for his shield booster ran dry while the Succubus was still in shields.  Rosewalker continued to pulse his booster whenever he had the cap, but he began to hit structure while the Succubus was at half armor.  Eventually the Sansha fire was too much and the Maelstrom exploded in a blinding flash as escape pods spouted forth from the stricken ship.

Sometimes capsuleers are seen as uncaring to non-capsuleers.  After all, if they die, they just wind up in another body, so why shouldn't they put their ships at risk?  In this case, I could afford the loss of a Maelstrom.  I even learned something from its loss.  And Wandering Rose did go back and pick up the passengers from the InterBus ship and return them safely to the station.  But people seldom think of the crews of the ships.  As of this time we are still conducting rescue operations, but hope is growing slim of finding anymore pods.  And given the nature of the foe we faced, I really hope those we didn't find didn't survive.

Study: Cheating in Online Games Spreads Like A Virus

"Cheaters are unethical individuals who can model the position of individuals in large-scale non-hierarchical communities that abuse the shared social space. In online social networks, they can model the abuse of available, legal tools, such as intensive use of communication tools for political activism. Taken to the extreme, such behavior leads to the tragedy of the commons: all players become cheaters and then abandon the game; corruption escalates and chaos takes place; and communication is buried in noise."

- Cheaters in the Steam Community Gaming Social Network (p. 1)

Last week a research team led by Jeremy Blackburn of the University of South Florida published what they claim is the biggest study on cheating in on-line games done to date.  The study looked at cheating by players using Steam.  Not only does Steam have something called the Valve Anti-Cheat System that marks users as cheaters, but has APIs that the researchers could use to crawl through the available information on which accounts were flagged as having cheated on an on-line game.  The researchers collected data for more than 12 million Steam users and found over 720,000 accounts that had been flagged for cheating in at least one on-line game.

The big "news" coming out of the study is that players who are friends with players who cheat (like macro miners and other botters in Eve Online) are more likely to become cheaters than those who do not have friends in a game who cheat.  However, from an Eve perspective, I believe that the geographic information is just as noteworthy.  The study looked at the accounts from 10 countries, (US, Brazil, Russia, Germany, France, UK, Poland, Canada, Australia, Sweden, Denmark and Norway) and compared them, looking to see if geographic location accounted for the likelihood of a player cheating.  The results may surprise some Eve players.

Source: Cheaters in Steam.pdf (p. 9)

While many claim that the Russians are the biggest botters, at least in the Steam community that is not the case.  According to the research players from the Nordic countries of Denmark, Norway and Sweden are the most likely to engage in cheating.  The research team came to this conclusion about geography:

"Cheater distribution does not follow geographical, realworld [sic] population density. The fact that some regions have higher percentages of cheaters to the player population may suggest that cheating behavior is inspired by the tighter geo-social clustering speci c [sic] to a geo-social culture. Such cheating-prone communities can be the target of more scrutiny or are the result of higher tolerance to cheating behavior, both in the legislature and in the gaming population." (p. 14)

The research done might have some consequences for both gamers and social networks in general.

"Our study has consequences for gaming in particular, but also for other online social networks with unethical members. In the case of gaming, individual servers can evaluate the cheating risk of a new player by looking at a combination of attributes inferred from the player's pro le that include the fraction of VAC-banned friends. Our preliminary investigations in this direction show that traditional machine learning algorithms (such as logistical regression, naive Bayes, and decision trees) can classify players as cheaters or noncheaters with accuracy between 65% and 74%. More work in this direction is left for the future." (p. 14)

As much as I've applauded CCP Screeg's War on Bots this past spring, I'm not ready to start instituting screening procedures like this for games yet.  I guess I'm too much like CONCORD and prefer to punish wrongdoers after they commit the violation.

Christmas Week Change In Eve

I originally intended to take today off and finish my Christmas shopping and kill a few Angel Cartel ships but events caused a change of plans.  Today's dev blogs, in combination with this week's earlier leadership announcement, were just too enticing not to write about today.

Today's big news is that DUST 514 has emerged from the land of vaporware as CCP announced that beta signup begins today.  Right now sign up is currently limited to those who are subscribed to Eve Online.  Previously, CCP announced that all attendees of the 2012 Fanfest would receive beta keys.

With the coming of a second game into the New Eden universe comes a new senior producer for Eve Online.  The former senior producer, Arnar Gylfason (aka CCP Zulu) is stepping aside for the head of CCP's Carbon technology team, Jon "CCP Unifex" Lander.  Based on the introductory dev blog, Lander intends on polishing the current game:

"As Zulu  has already mentioned, now is the time to improve the EVE. The task ahead of us in 2012 is not to be taken lightly. We are changing EVE’s internal project structure to bring it in line with a product that has nearly 200 people working on it and making sure that everyone is concentrating on delivering a game which has real value for our players. As well as changing the project organization, we will also be spending time on improving our internal tools, pipelines and processes to improve our efficiency and effectiveness for the future.

"Finally, we will be concentrating on those features we already have in the game after 8 years of development. Yes, we will be iterating (it‘s not a dirty word) on those features which need some polish, balance, fixes and general love. The releases throughout 2012 will be an extension of the type of release we had with Crucible with the addition of a theme to help us scope and tie the work into a really compelling and coherent package. The first theme is going to be War and everyone is getting very excited about it.

"I had some great meetings with the CSM when they were recently here in Iceland and hopefully you will see in the minutes, when they come out, that the future is looking pretty good for EVE, spaceships and you, our players. I will be trying to keep everyone updated on our progress as we go through 2012 and look forward to meeting many of you at Fanfest where, as well as all the great things you have come to expect, we will have something a little different and special for you."

While some may lambast CCP Zulu's time as senior producer, he came in at a bad time for Eve development.  

His first dev blog in August 2010 became infamous for the statement that CCP only had three teams of 28 developers working on the "flying in space" portion of Eve Online.  CCP Zulu's tenure will be remembered as the "18 months" when CCP put Eve on the backburner as it tried to develop DUST 514 and World of Darkness.  Now that CCP has decided to pour resources into its flagship game, CCP Zulu will not get to enjoy the change in focus (and resources) unless he is moved to another important position.

The final development was the dev blog that announced the publication of Tony Gonzales' latest Eve novel, Eve: Templar One.  The shocking news was that the novel is Gonzales' last contribution to the Eve canon.  He is being let go as the IP Development Manager, although for the moment he is still employed.  Here is his goodbye:

"Bringing EVE to life through storytelling and world building has been one of my greatest joys. For the past six years, I’ve devoted myself to building this IP through the sheer power of her setting—hands down the most underutilized force in EVE. I walked the floors of conventions dreaming of the day when we might have a 30 foot tall poster of Tibus Heth or Empress Jamyl to compete with the larger-than-life icons of other IP’s like the Master Chief and Commander Sheppard. EVE’s story is so deep and offers so much to science fiction fans that it has every potential to reach those heights. It could take years, decades, or longer. But the fact remains that it’s possible. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I know that’s kept me inspired since 2003.

"EVE: Templar One is a labor of love that began in 2009. For now, itis [sic] my last contribution to EVE’s fiction as I was amongst the casualties of the recent difficult times CCP endured. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed creating it. My publishers and dev colleagues are excited for it, and I hope you are too.

"Your support over the years has been overwhelming, and I’ll never forget it. From the bottom of my heart, thank you for everything."

The post was quickly moved off the top of the dev blog feed with other blogs, CCP's version of the Friday document dump we see in the United States from government officials.  For those who love the lore, what will the replacement of the head of the IP development mean?  Something to look forward to in 2012.  But looking back at the world Mr. Gonzales created, I'll just say that Tony, you did a great job and you will be missed.

Four Quick Links For Eve Online Beginners

I am currently working on a post aimed at those just beginning to play Eve Online designed to get them started in the universe of New Eden.  The task is a little bigger than I originally thought and I may not get it finished before Christmas.  So since some people may begin playing over the holiday weekend I thought I would at least post the three sources and one Eve-related application I use the most.

Before I continue, I want to urge all new players to do the tutorial missions.  What CCP calls the New Player Experience is much improved over what I ran two years ago and doing the missions, in addition to teaching you the game, sets players up with a nice beginning war chest of ships and cash.

ISK: Industrial-Sized Knowledgebase - I have the print edition, but the ISK guide is also available as a free download.  For new players I recommend reading the first part on getting started.  It is a quick and easy read.  Well, compared to other sources.  The guide is a bit dated, having not been updated for Crucible.  But still a very good source.

The Evelopedia - The Evelopedia is the official CCP wiki for Eve Online.   The site is not written solely by CCP, which many would consider a good thing.  As is befitting a game in which much of the content is player-driven, the Evelopedia seeks out contributions from the player base.  Overall, I use the Evelopedia a lot when looking up information.

Eve University Wiki - Eve University is a player corporation (or a guild or clan to players of other games) that has worked since 2003 helping new players into New Eden.  Over the past few years the UniWiki has greatly improved and is a site I go to primarily for planetary interaction information and for the excellent Eve University Class Library.  Eve University gives classes over Mumble and makes the audio recordings available to all.  The class library also contains links to video guides as well.

EVEMon - No list of information for new players is complete without a mention of EVEMon.  EVEMon is an essential tool for managing a pilot's skill development.  With all skill learning occurring in real time instead of by whacking on mobs, developing a skill plan is essential to making the best use of time.  Eve University provides a guide for new players on how to use EveMon as well as an audio class in the class library on how to use EVEMon with another popular application, the Eve Fitting Tool.

Looking For A Few Bad Angels

Over the past two nights I decided I do not like combat missions.  Sure, combat missions are a nice break from courier missions every once in a while, but as the main thing I do?  They are not for me.  I have to add one caveat.  I like missions where I kill members of the Angel Cartel.

Why the Angel Cartel?  I do have a long term goal that requires acquiring Angel tags and killing the Angel Cartel fulfills that.  But I felt that way before I set getting those faction ship blueprint copies as a goal.  Maybe early experience influences ways of thinking and I spent most of my first months as a capsuleer killing the Angel Cartel.  Or perhaps because of the roleplay that goes on in my mind, I don't want to kill the Serpentis because of their connection with Eifyr and Co.  I have tied a lot of my play around Wandering Rose's relationship with the Minmatar biochemical company which is a reason why I've moved my operations to Nakugard to aid in increasing my standings with the Krusual tribe.  So who else is left to fight that isn't an empire?

Now, I don't want to chase after the Dominion in Curse; I am not that ambitious.  But I do want to fight the Angel Cartel.  Perhaps the missions situation will improve once the incursion fleets finally take down the Sansha forces in the Ani constellation and I can work on my Krusual standings.  I think I may have to stop relying on mission agents and do some hunting of my own.  Of course, the last time I did that, things didn't turn out so well.  Perhaps it is time for me to get over that and try my had at exploration again.  After all, I must have learned something over the last year, right?

Pavlov's Dogs

Over the weekend I moved much of my operations to Nakugard in Metropolis' Ani constellation.  The Ani constellation is interesting because not only is it the Minmatar COSMOS highsec constellation with all systems having a security status of .5, but all of the Minmatar-owned stations as well as the Sisters of EVE Bureau stations have cloning facilities.  So I figured I'd run some missions for the Krusual Tribe to get access to more lovely jump clone facilities and try to pick up some Angel tags to buy blueprint copies of Minmatar faction ships.

At the end of Saturday night I jumped my Orca into Nakugard and received a shock.  Sansha had invaded Ani.  Fortunately for me, the anti-incursion fleets had been in system and I did not have a Sansha greeting party waiting for me.  In fact, my display indicated that all Sansha anti-ship effects that reduced armor, shield and capacitor had been completely neutralized by the anti-incursion fleets.  So I docked in the system's Republic University School system and logged off for the night, confident that the Sansha would be defeated by the time I logged back in.

I did a lot of Christmas shopping Sunday and didn't climb back into a ship until Sunday night.  I was surprised that the Sansha mothership was still operating in the system.  Apparently at the brink of defeat the anti-incursion forces were stopped dead.  Was the mothership really that powerful?  I asked in local and found out that the anti-incursion fleets were ignoring the vulnerable main threat to the planetary populations in the constellation and instead were "farming" the secondary forces because it was more profitable.  Isk.  Yes, you can always count on us capsuleers to try to squeeze isk out of any situation.

The question I have is: what is that old devil Sansha Kuvakei up to?  Sansha may be evil and several kinds of crazy, but he's also brilliant.  Why does he continue to sacrifice valuable motherships and support fleets this way?  I know he doesn't care about the crews, but shouldn't losing that much material hurt eventually?  He has obviously established an operational pattern that has convinced anti-incursion fleet commanders to not go for the jugular and piddle around with the small-fry.  So when is Sansha going to break the pattern and do something really nasty?  And what evil will Sansha unleash on New Eden when he does so?  I really don't care to find out, but with so many capsuleers trained like a pack of dog show poodles, I don't know who will stop him.

Goodbye Fratt!

I wrote a few weeks ago about Fratt Asmurdik, an agent for the Republic Parliament and his apparent infatuation with Wandering Rose.  But now that the Khumaak Flying Circus has met its goals concerning relations with the Republic Parliament (over 9.9 standings) Fratt is no longer necessary to her plans.  So after receiving another offer to do a kill mission, Wandering Rose just ignored Fratt.  Her mother taught her if she didn't have anything nice to say, to not say anything at all.  Well, the agent sent this Evemail yesterday:

From: Fratt Asmurdik
Sent: 2011.12.18 22:45 

I can no longer await your response to my offer. I am displeased by your indecisiveness.

Typical Brutor male arrogance!  Do all Brutor men think they are God's gift to women?  Did it ever cross his mind that he could not get into the bed of a capsuleer by diverting a few million isk in missions to Wandering Rose?  I've never met anyone in New Eden in more desperate need of a blow job than Fratt Asmurdik.  And he thinks Wandering Rose is the one with the problem?

Wandering Rose can afford to ignore him as the Khumaak Flying Circus has shifted operations back to the Ani constellation.  And after all the work increasing her influence with the Republic Parliament, she is not going to undo it by a clumsy act of revenge.  However, if she gets the chance (and can get past that damn door), Wandering Rose would really like to re-enact the final scene of this video with a certain agent based in Ridoner.

Zynga, Nexon Go Public

This week saw two big on-line gaming companies, go public with initial public offerings (IPO) worth over $1 billion.   U.S.-based Zynga, makers of Farmville, raised $1 billion with an IPO of 100 million shares at $10 each.  The Tokyo-based Nexon, creators of Maple Story, raised approximately $1.2 billion with a sale of 70 million shares at 1,300 yen, or approximately $16.90 per share. 

I know I've played too much Eve Online when I can draw a CCP analogy between the Icelandic space vikings and the two IPOs.  Zynga's Farmville invites a comparison to Eve's Planetary Interaction, especially the first iteration of PI which was a clickfest, just like Farmville.  Zynga reminds me of CCP CEP Hilmar Veigar Petursson before the launch of Incarna.  Way overconfident.  The $10 share price was at the top end of the predicted is potentially a disaster in the making for purchasers of the stock, with analysts already predicting a sharp drop in price.  Arvind Bhatia, an analyst at Sterne Agee, played the roll of bitter vet and placed a "sell" rating on Zynga stock before the stock begins trading on NASDAQ today.

“'Farmville, the company’s flagship title which helped generate hyper-growth in the past, has peaked and the other titles are coming on line at a much slower pace,' the analyst wrote in a note to clients Tuesday.

“'While we believe in the potential for social games, we think Zynga’s growth is slowing even faster than what is obvious at first. Its margins are under pressure, and free cash flow has been declining recently; thus we believe the implied valuation in the IPO is not justified.'”

Nexon, the company CCP has hired to bring Eve Online client to the Japanese market, on the other hand plays the role of Hilmar after the Summer of Rage and bases its price on reality.  The price reflected a price to earnings (P/E) ratio of 17:1, which while a bit high, is reasonable.  The price slipped 2.3% on the first day of trading on the Tokyo Stock Exchange down to 1270 yen, but analysts are positive.  The Wall Street Journal reported that:

"Deutsche Securities initiated Nexon at Hold with a Y1,400 target price, saying that while shares have already largely priced in current growth, expansion onto smartphone and social networking site platforms will be a key point going forward."

And according to one analyst explained the first day price drop this way:

"'Part of the problem is that they priced it at fair value, so it wasn't going to come on at a huge premium,' said David Gibson, an analyst at Macquarie Capital Securities in Tokyo, also noting some Nexon shareholders were allowed to offload their holdings immediately."

So we have two game companies, one that is over-hyping itself looking to cash in on its main product before the buzz goes away and the other trying to base its business on reality.  The situation really does sound like CCP in 2011 to me.