Goal update

Today's developer updates, particularly the UI one, reminded me of the goals I set for myself a couple of weeks into playing:

• Garner enough funds to buy a cruiser
• Putter around a bunch of level 2 missions 
• Buy blueprints for a cruiser
• Get proficient enough at mining to scramble enough materials to make and sell copies of that cruiser

Done.

It didn't take too long after I bought that Thorax cruiser before I could fly it. I did, and then moved up to a Brutix battlecruiser that got blown up two weeks later. I've moved up to a battleship, which I've decked out to run level 4 missions for more money and better standing with a couple of NPC factions. I had the money to buy an original (as opposed to a less expensive copy of a) Thorax blueprint, and carved out enough ore to provide most of the manufacturing material. This weekend, I popped the blueprint and the refined ore (plus some extras I had to buy) into the queue to manufacture at the Dodixie IX Federation Navy plant.

Overall, this operation still has me in the red, i.e. I haven't recouped the cost of buying the blueprint by selling enough of the cruisers. Heck, the first one hasn't even come off the assembly line. I need to do some poking around to figure out where to sell them: Dodixie has a pretty active market, but it might be worthwhile to put them on sale in some of the starter space stations, where new players (particularly some trying to get a leg up by cashing in PLEX) might buy an overpriced ship in exchange for not having to travel to a different market. I might also discover that I can make more money selling copies of this original blueprint rather than spending the time mining (or the money buying) materials to build them myself.

From eveonline.com

This summer, Eve will get a significant overhaul to its industry mechanics. Some of the changes seem more like they're rearranging and combining columns of figures rather than adjusting their values, so to speak. Simplifying rather than changing mechanics -- and I'm all for that. Something I appreciated from the UI blog is the graphic at right, which visualizes exactly my thinking around taking these first few steps in the industry gameplay. I look forward to the overall UI changes, ditching some of the tabs with tabs and making language more consistent. We'll see how it all plays out.

Thieving

Well, I stole something. I hadn't planned to, and thieving's never really occurred to me as something to do. A few times in the high-security space I usually fly in, I've seen and poked at others' wrecked ships or dropped cargo containers, but I've been warned about thieving and have always just sauntered off.

Not earlier this week, though. Fiddling with scanning down "cosmic signatures" -- isolated spots that contain pirate sites, relics, other neat and valuable stuff -- I found a wormhole. Wormholes connect to areas with no laws, the figurative wild west. They tend to have lots of valuable loot and dangerous opponents. So, I popped in and looked. Scanned a bunch of interesting stuff that I might've gone after if I'd been in a more appropriate wormhole exploration ship.

From tiefighters.com

And I also found a secure container. Except the password to secure the container wasn't set. Curious, I flew over, considering along the way that it was bait. But, no: opened the crate, saw a bunch of mjolnir heavy missiles. About 200,000 ISK worth. Just sitting there.

But not for long. Not a huge fortune, but more than I'd had a moment before. No warning from the game about being vulnerable to violent reprisal, no risk of the space-cops coming down. Just there to take.

One of the undercurrents of Eve how-tos and tutorials is, "You'll make a mistake and learn not to do it again." It's happened to me already. I suppose this missile stockpiler will be more diligent about setting passwords.

For myself, I've learned that stealing is easy. Later, I might learn that that stealing isn't easy, and more often than not is a trap. We'll see?

Calling Senator Clay Davis

From Kleinmania.com

Relevant, for those who've not seen The Wire -- and delightful for those who have.

In all my "look what I can do with VLOOKUP!" enthusiasm from the last post, I made a pretty huge mistake.

I incorrectly asserted that it'd take over 22 years to level up all 100 or so "important skills" [to me, now] to their maximum level. Not so much: just 3.8 years. I'd forgotten to filter the important skills from all skills; the latter is whence the two-decade count. I've since corrected the spreadsheet.

Looks like I may be level 4 VLOOKUP, but my SUMIF is only at level 2. Ahhh, spreadsheet humor.

Make good decisions

[I made a pretty bad spreadsheet error before I posted this. See the next entry for the correction.]

I made a few additions to the skill-planning spreadsheet I created and shared with the world. It was easy enough to have it calculate how long it would take to train all the 105 skills I've identified as "important" up one level from their current state. Today, I plugged in the math to calculate how long it would take to max out all those skills to level 4.

22.5 years.

Yes, it would take over two decades to train all the skills useful to my capsuleer to their maximum level. That's almost twice as long as the game's existed. Among registered users at Eveboard, the character Drahcir Nasom has the most Level V skills: 286, developed for almost 11 years. In that time, Eve has made lots of changes to how skills and skill-learning work. In fact, this summer they will make some tweaks to skills affecting resource processing and drone operation. Those seem relatively miniscule, though, compared to a massive 2010 skill-learning overhaul and another affecting ship piloting last summer.

Last week, I wrote about how this spreadsheet has helped me make decisions. One specific example is the Cybernetics skill. This skill allows the character to use increasingly potent implants, some of which increase core attribute values. There are five attributes, and their values affect the rate at which the character learns skills. Therefore, more powerful implants allow for faster skill training. That said, the accelerated rate is relatively small, perhaps shaving a few hours from a skill-training time that otherwise takes days. Thanks to the spreadsheet, I ascertained that the time up front to max out Cybernetics and install the most powerful implants will save much more time from future training. It's a good investment.

Currently, my Cybernetics level is at 4, and the math above is based on how rapidly my character trains with current-level implants. Maxing the skill to level 5 and plugging in the appropriate implants does, in fact, shave some time off that 23-year figure.

It brings it down to just under 22 years.

Removing the implants and their bonus? Over 27 years to max those skills. If, after looking at the spreadsheet, you're curious: my VLOOKUP skill is about level 4.

These numbers, though, are kind of red herrings. My "important skills" cover a lot of territory, and only a few of them are so important that I feel an urge to max them out: Cybernetics for one, plus a few that are prerequisites for ships I want to fly or more advanced skills to develop. In truth, right now there are fewer than a dozen that I'd prioritize maxing out.

I wrote to a friend last week that in Eve, "you can be fair to pretty good in multiple areas of gameplay, or truly superb at one." It might've been more apt to replace or with and: I'll take most of the skills important to me up to level 3 or 4 and, in the course of trying them on and getting into a groove, decide on a subset to get really good at, i.e. max out. Given enough time, maybe that group grows. What I didn't think of at the time is that there's a whole area of skills and experience I right now don't plan to delve much into, e.g. frigates and destroyers and their commensurate small-scale weapons, missile-heavy Caldari hulls or laser-happy Amarrian ships, or stocks and market manipulation. Put another way: I've tagged 105 skills as important, but the game offers close to 400. And, of course, anything can change.

It occurs to me that this openness of pursuits, with a vast timeline and squirrely to-do list and no due date, reminds me of another project I'm involved with. I've edited Wikipedia since July 2005, and one of that project's tenets also seems relevant when thinking about Eve skill training: there is no deadline.

There are good folks in New Eden

After Die Hard, Scrooged is my favorite Christmas movie. It starts with a pair of promos for a TV network's rendition of A Christmas Tale: the first from milquetoast execs, the second from the boss, Frank Cross. The latter is meant to make viewers terrified to miss the special, and it sets the tone with a bevy of "similarly" terrifying issues: acid rain, drug addiction, international terrorism, freeway killers.

Ah, freeway killers. Ran into them. Twice.

The first time was kind of a stunner. I had picked up a contract to haul a bunch of stuff from point A to point B in the game's high-security (high-sec) area. High-sec is new-player friendly, a usually pretty safe if boring sandbox to figure things out. Alas, I was suicide ganked, i.e. my ship blown up out from under me, and then someone picked up all the precious cargo from the scraps (I'll explain the suicide part in a bit). I had a browser window open over most of the game and caught a flash of red, heard an explosion, but didn't see it happen. Dang. I did, however, get kill rights on the offender, i.e. I could later fight them without fear of retribution from the in-game cops.

My capsule docked, and I started puttering in the market, shopping for a new cargo ship with my insurance money and trying not to think too much about the now-lost collateral I had to give up to snag the contract. In the midst of this, I got a message from another player who'd been nearby, saw what happened, and followed the offenders. (Yes, offenders: the in-game cops showed up and blew away the guy who killed me, which was predictable, hence the suicide part of suicide ganking; however, he had an alternate account simultaneously logged in or a colleague in the area who scooped up my cargo, which is perfectly legal.) He sent me the location in case I was interested in sweet vengeance, and he also offered to just blow him up if I sold him those kill rights (a cool mechanic). Not being anywhere near my regular crash pad and combat ship, I just gave him the rights and, not too much later, got a notice telling me the attacker had been blown up. Nice!

Around the same time, I also got a message from another player. He offered condolences on my loss and offered me an invitation to join his tiny, four-player corporation. They're more into the player-versus-player (PvP) aspect of the game, which I'm not quite ready to jump into (of my own volition, at least), but it was a nice offer, regardless.

The other time I got destroyed, it was totally my fault: I picked up a contract that would take me into low-security (low-sec) space, where guns are freer to fire without repercussion. Sure enough, I blindly jumped into low-sec just hoping for the best. I was immediately warp-scrambled (i.e. I couldn't escape with my faster-than-light drive) and my poorly-defended ship was blown away in seconds. I completely deserved it.

And, I learned from it, too. I discovered a filter built into the map that lets you see how many pilots have been in a particular area in the last half hour, and also how many kills within a similarly tight window. There are some other useful views, too. This meant that before I picked up my next contract going into low-sec, I checked recent activity and made an informed decision about whether to take the contract. I did, and got in and out unscathed. And I now have, too, a new ship hull to train up for: the game has blockade runners, which can equip extra protections (even a cloaking device) to deal specifically with low-sec space. It's about 20 days of skill-training time, and I might queue up the long ones when I'm next on vacation.

Spreadsheets ... in spaaaaace!

I did an incognito-mode Google search for "spreadsheets in space," and the top hits are Eve-oriented pages and images. A pair of developer blog posts (here and here) from the last two weeks present seven charts, two diagrams, one table and even an actual spreadsheet. Some of the UI presents tabularized data: contracts, market trends. Easy from quick glances to get clued in to whence the "Spreadsheet Simulator in Space" moniker.

On the flip side, the Polygon article I mentioned last month references but dismisses the label; veteran players report never creating a spreadsheet to help with Eve. One of those Google hits is an article titled "Why EVE Online Isn't The Spreadsheet Simulator You Might Think It Is." The developers partnered with Dark Horse Comics to release a four-issue series depicting players' stories about their game experiences. I've read all four issues (they're free online until 6 June), and there's nary a spreadsheet. Those in-game spreadsheets are for features and gameplay aspects a novice player isn't likely to stumble into, or at least use, until he or she is more vested in the game; mission information, ship-fitting, and the spaceflight UI are much more image-driven.

I work in education, and we often talk about and look for data: program efficacy, student performance, trends in grading and assessment, attendance. To paraphrase Wendy's, "Where's the data?" The reminder we often give ourselves, and to parents around grades and assessments, is that data is useful for influencing and discussing decisions, but it isn't a final determinant. And that notion is what I think comes into play with Eve: data informs decisions, but it isn't the gameplay itself.

Although the notion of playing a stellar (haha) spreadsheet simulator didn't affect my decision to start, I can absolutely see how they can be useful in Eve. I created my first Eve spreadsheet to figure out what it would take to earn enough in-game cash from mining nearby ores to avoid paying real-world dollars for a subscription. Turns out, it would take 2-3 hours of mining every day: that's a lot of time, and mining is not how I want to spend it. So, I've set that aside and jumped into the contracts system, hauling freight from one place to another. In the process, I've had two ships blown out from under me -- I'll write about those lessons learned later -- but it's been pretty fun. Probably making less money, but at least I know mining right now won't yield lots of real-world savings.

And then I created a spreadsheet to help prioritize skills to train. There are nice tools out there: I hear EVEMon is great under Windows, and I still use its Vitality Mac form as a referent. But, I made my own tool to prioritize and lay things out. It helped me solve a conundrum or two and to experiment with  some what ifs other tools don't handle so well.

I like that the folks who make Eve seem so aware of data. They're changing the way drones work based on a stark statistic showing that two of the four races' drones account for the vast majority of shots fired; the other two are rarely used. They explained the rationale behind the change clearly, and the spreadsheet I mentioned above shows how stats will stand once the change is implemented. I've noticed two other queries for data: a survey about participation in a recent tournament, and the aforementioned process of creating the Dark Horse comics. More than other game developers I've seen, the folks at CCP seem to relish the quantitative and qualitative and, like their players, keep an eye turned toward it when deciding what to do next.