Playing the long game

My daughter was born a couple of weeks ago. There's a lame joke to be made about a frigate-sized baby requiring many years of real-world skill training to pilot. But, the more apt observation is that this noob is handily piloting a pair of Titan-sized tenders.

February 15, 2014, was my first day with Eve. Since then, my family has moved, we've had a baby, and my dog has doubled in size. In the game, I've churned through five characters, whittled down to three. (Yesterday, I briefly regretted getting rid of my stripminer, Rosy: picking at asteroids seems an easy, casual way to do something in the game while doing a 3:00 a.m. bottle feeding. But, then I remembered: I'd much rather sit in our nice corner rocking chair than this creaky desk chair. So, no sweat.) In that span, I've flown over a dozen types of ships, racing up to cruisers and battlecruisers, plateauing for a spell with a battleship, clawing my way into a marauder ... only to look around and wish for the speed and energy of a frigate. It's all been very exciting.

I wrote before about trying to squeeze in as much Eve as possible before baby's arrival, but alas that didn't happen. Spent more time playing X-Wing Alliance, plus a bit of Grim Fandango. All other things being equal -- or, unchanged -- I'd be jumping headlong back into Eve. While X-Wing games have been fun, their nostalgia and neo-novelty value is waning, but Eve is always fresh, and I have plenty of goals I've barely crawled toward. But: baby!

Soon after leaving graduate school, I made one of my first Adult Decisions: I took $100 and put it in a Certificate of Deposit. A year later, I'd made $6 interest! Well, Eve is about to become my next CD, with a minimum one-year term: no-touch (much), but with higher value when it comes out of the oven. And that's due to a big change in the game in November: CCP removed the requirement that all queued skills begin training within 24 hours, and players now can queue up to 50 skills regardless of when training starts.

Well, Eemiv has 50 skills lined up, training time to complete in about a year. (Technically, a bit sooner: in April, I'll realign Eemiv's core attributes to accelerate training.) Eemiv's core ship-fitting skills are pretty well maxed out; a year hence, he'll be maxed out in additional gunnery, maneuver, and ship types. Dengar's parallel queue isn't as long, only about 60 days: I've tightly trained her up for frigates and cruisers (around which she's well maxed out) and, more recently, logistics. In about a month, her parallel training (which costs extra money) will end; when Eemiv's queue is done, Dengar's remaining 30 days will wrap up. I'll continue to update Eemiv's skill planning spreadsheet as things tick off -- thank you, Eve Droid, for keeping me posted on these developments without me needing to log in or fire up Evemon in bootcamp. My final character, Talon, has a few market orders ending in about a week: I'll need to renew them, and that's kind of a blessing because it also means I can consolidate a few of them.

As I've thought about the changes that come with having a baby, I've realized that as much as I love games, I enjoy reading and writing more. Those two things are more compatible with being interrupted by an unpredictable child. (And, when there is time for games, titles kike Grim Fandango are a better fit than Eve in my current circumstances.) Still, I plan to continue to write about Eve -- I have a few draft entries begun -- but this may be coupled with a few other topics. I've given some thought to consolidating this blog with my blog on model-building, and perhaps just broaden it to be "a place to write about stuff" (such as the books I'm reading: I just finished Leviathan Wakes, which was pretty amazing). We will see.

o7, everyone.

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.

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.

Day 13: Traffic

My first thought from before I wrote the last post managed to completely escape my mind when I actually composed it. And it's this: the game's presentation of ships rather than people reminds me of something I read in Traffic, a great text about the engineering and psychology behind driving and roads (cool companion text: The Big Roads). One of the earlier observations is that we have a tendency to dehumanize our fellow drivers by describing behavior on the road as that of the car rather than the driver, e.g. "the red Civic cut me off" or "the SUV is driving erratically." Just a thought.

Go figure: as soon as I posted about my ship, I promptly jumped into a different vessel. I've thought about what I want to do in this game, and my list looks something like this:

• Garner enough funds to buy a cruiser
• Putter around a bunch of level 2 missions (those massless missions I mentioned before -- there are five difficulty levels, and I've only delved into level 1)
• Save up to buy blueprints for a cruiser
• Get proficient enough at mining that I can scramble enough materials together to make and sell copies of that cruiser

I own one of these -- but, I can't yet use it.
From Eve-Wiki

There are lots of things I need to do along the way to make that happen: skill training, purchasing smartly (i.e. weighing the time it takes to travel to a place for a good deal vs. paying a premium for a local sale), just making good decisions. One of the first things to do, though, is to raise capital: hence a change in ship. I hopped into a huge cargo ship, strapped on a mining laser, and very, very slowly made my way over to a bunch of rocks to mine. Took 66 minutes to fill the digital cargo hold, with a few moments trimmed off once I bought some assistant mining drones. Holy cow, I thought. This is going to take forever. It was nice, though, that I could work for a few minutes, then step away to be with my wife or get work done and still make headway in the game: this mining was all happening in "high-security" space, where I almost certainly wouldn't be attacked by other players or AI pirates.

Through this mining endeavor, though, I had my first real ship-on-ship action with another player: early on, I set my vessel to orbit an asteroid, blasting away with its mining laser, while I caught up on emails and the news. I returned to the game about 20 minutes later to check on things ... and discovered another player in the system had bumped into my ship, causing it to break orbit and veery off, quite far away from the asteroid field. (As an interesting gameplay note, there seems not to be any collision damage in this game.) I returned to orbit, went away again, and got bumped. Not an accident. I should've just kept the ship sitting still.

This wasn't the only thing I was doing wrong. I did some research, and it turns out another of the freeby ships I'd been awarded at the end of a tutorial strand was a far superior miner. I missed that this ship had a separate hold for mined ore much larger even than the cargo ship. It was also faster, could house an extra mining laser, and in general has been a huge improvement. What I'd been doing before was basically using a school bus to pick up packages rather than a smaller but better-fitted and more efficiently configured UPS van.

Making the switch vastly sped up my mining turnaround time; a few hours ago, I sold a whole bunch of mined ore, putting me over the top to buy that cruiser. I've garnered enough materials since then to sell in a second wave, and that should be enough to comfortable outfit the vessel.

And how about that new ship itself? Well, I can't fly it yet: the acceleration in raising money outpaced my training on the skills to run the new ship. Around 1:00am tomorrow, I'll be appropriately trained -- and then, I'll let you know. More on this whole skills and training thing later.