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.

Nerd alert!

Everything is normal here

My first thought seeing Google's post about adding linear optimization tools to Google Sheets was to apply them toward skill training. Specifically, prioritizing my characters' skill plans based on skill-points-per-hour and the times in a few months when I can re-distribute core attributes; NB an April post about skill training in general. This mechanic is one of the most enticing aspects of the game for me, although I also agree with some ideas about revamping the system.

Anyhow, I have a distinguished history of being branded a "nerd" by my wife when I talk about Eve stuff (really, most things); hopefully, this post and my enthusiasm for the new tools will set a new high bar for spousal mockery.

Goals update

In March, I laid out goals that I ended up accomplishing two months later. Along the way, an underlying goal for myself was to figure out what gameplay styles I liked and to identify what, if anything, I'm playing for. Time, I think, to lay out some new goals now that I'm more attuned to the game. Within two months, I want to

• Equip and operate Eemiv's Kronos Marauder with tech 2 equipment. Tech 2 modules have a performance edge over basic "tech 1" modules, but they require higher levels of skill training. For example, to mount 425mm Prototype Gauss Guns on the Kronos, Eemiv needed to train the Large Hybrid Turret skill to level I. To equip the tech 2 425mm Railgun IIs, Eemiv needs Large Hybird Turret to level V and Sharpshooter to level V (about four weeks' additional training time) ...  and when that's done, he needs to train Large Railgun Specialization to level I (just an hour -- but, several more weeks if I decide to bump that up Level V, too). Not all tech 2 modules have such steep requirements; the ship already mostly has tech 2, but there are some holdouts. Tech 2 modules also generally require higher resources from the ship -- power supply, computing power, etc. Fortunately, Eemiv has already trained up most of the core "fitting" skills that affect these systems to level V. I did a quick sketch of the math, and it looks like meeting this goal will require at most a month's time if I plunge right through it.
• Create a jump clone of Eemiv and move one of them out to low-security space. I enjoy high-security space mission running, but it's time to get my feet wet living and playing, too, in riskier low- or maybe even null-security space. Jump clones are a carbon copy of the character and, once every 24 hours, you can swap from one to the other. Therefore, I can e.g. jump over to my high-security clone after work and fly a mission for some ISK, and then on the weekend set out for more lucrative looting in low-security areas.
• Participate in at least two RvB weekend events, including one that involves flying and fighting in cruisers. This is for the Dengar character, and a chance for me to get more comfortable with PvP. Two weekend events might not seem like much, but even this might be a bit of a stretch because of a few competing real-world priorities.

I also have one stretch desire, not time-bound so it isn't a goal per se: train up Eemiv for tech 2 logistics ship piloting, and get experience supporting other pilots. This is a career/skill track I'm increasingly curious about, and even leans toward my playstyle in e.g. Team Fortress II and Battlefield: Bad Company II, where I often was a medic. 

Ctrl Alt ... Delete!

I've written about secondary accounts I've set up to experiment in Eve's various career areas. Since starting in February, I've created four alternate characters, most of whom I've written about here. Finally, I've settled on the three characters I'm going to maintain. Here's the overall breakdown of who and what:

• Eemiv Tivianne: plugging along since February, this is my primary character. At zKillboard, you'll see an inglorious record of losing flimsy cargo ships and a couple of embarrassing losses to NPCs (um, plus part of some kill I have no recollection of). Right now, I mostly run level 4 missions with this fellow, bringing in about 10-20 million ISK each. He just finished training up to pilot a Kronos Marauder, which is a heavy duty battleship well suited to running missions. Indeed, I'd previously lamented how slow battleships move -- well, the Kronos mostly sits absolutely still, but wow! it cuts through bad guys fast. Next up is firing off some skills to use sentry drones, and after that I'm going to focus on getting more gunnery support skills up from level 3 up to 4 or 5. After rounding out my generic gunnery skills, I'll probably take a close look at taking a cruiser into wormhole space. 
• Rosy Tivianne: my first alt, which I'd made as a female avatar in response to feedback from my wife. I set her up as a miner, and got her up to snuff piloting a Mackinaw, one of the higher end strip-mining ships. However, the ship so quickly shred through asteroids that unless I paid rapt attention, there was a lot of idle time. It was a less engaging way to net about the same amount of money (and even then hypothetically: I'd still need to sell the ore) as mission-running. I strip-mined the character of its money and property and sent her to the biomass recycler. Creating and using this character was an practical lesson in weighing ISK per hour vs. "fun per effort:" in the end, mining just wasn't fun and not how I want to spend my limited time; I'd rather play the game than do the game.



Not to be confused with Long Haul, a Decepticon

• Laung Haul: This poor space-teamster was on the receiving end of my penchant for puns. I've written several times about Eemiv's inglorious outings hauling cargo, losing lots of collateral, etc. I trained up an alt to pilot Eve's capacious, sturdy freighters. And then I put him in one. And, wow, freighters are slow and boring. I considered selling the character, but it'd probably net nothing after paying character transfer fees. Recycler!
• Talon Morda: my station trader, buying low and selling high. I haven't updated his clone backup because this milquetoast will never leave his station. Started with logging in a few times per day to set up competitive prices and make a quick score, but I've been doing that less lately and am still doing okay. There are some ebbs and flows during the week in preparation for e.g. big weekend battles; market orders a few weeks old will suddenly get scooped up. He's trained up enough that I don't need to pay for additional character training, which is nice. Now that my main character is generally equipped for running missions, in addition to earning ISK Talon is buying ship equipment at good rates to keep my third and final surviving character geared up.



The bounty hunter Dengar is my
frigate brawler's namesake.

• Dengar Morda: the character I wrote about last time, my frigate-scale brawler chipping in with the perpetual (but fun-loving) war between the Blue Republic and Red Federation. With only a few weeks of training done, you can see she has single-digit percent contributions to a few kills. Dengar's mostly puttered in an Incursus frigate, but I recently tossed in some skill training to allow her to fly and fight with a medium-sized cruiser: in fact, I just bought her a few (because I expect some attrition) of the same Thorax-class I bought in March.

So, that's it. I created a second umbrella account to help my try on all these angles; it expires in a couple of weeks, and by then I'll have Eemiv, Talon, and Dengar consolidated under one account. It was worth the three-month subscription (plus a little extra to train multiple characters on the same account in parallel) to jump in, try on some career hats, and then pick what to stick with. Depending on few in- and out-of-game factors, I'll keeping Eemiv and Dengar training in parallel but not pay the extra to keep training Talon.

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.

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 18: Daily countdown

Experience is a delivery device for skills, knowledge, and connections -- a trio that garner opportunity, advancement, and prosperity. Eve works much the same way.

Eve presents skills interestingly. Skills allow you and/or your ship to do stuff; while the label might change (feats, abilities, talents), they're a roleplaying game (RPG) trope, back to Dungeons & Dragons. In some games, your character's actions create "experience points," and you "level up" and improve a skill or two at various point thresholds. Usually, you choose to improve a skill relevant to your gameplay, but you're not required to. In the first Mass Effect, you could kill lots of bad guys with your pistol, then improve your pistol skills at level-ups -- or, instead, you could invest in persuasion or grenades, even if you rarely use those abilities.

I enjoy the Elder Scrolls games in part because skill progression works differently: to get better at something, you have to do it. Want to be a powerful swordsman? Swing one at bad guys. A lot. It's a lite version of the "10,000-Hours Rule" from Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, or James Kirk telling a cadet that "we learn by doing."

Eve does its own thing, functionally and aesthetically. To start developing a skill, you acquire the relevant skill book -- digiliterally,* an item represented by an anachronistic tome.  (*My own portmanteaux: "literally," within the digital world's conceit. "My teammate literally stabbed me in the back with an energy sword!" complained the Halo player. No: your teammate did it digiliterally.) Skills take time to develop: sometimes five minutes, sometimes weeks. Once that countdown elapses, bam, you can do something new or better. Each skill has five levels of mastery, with stacking bonuses (e.g. an additional 5% boost in mining laser efficiency for each tier), and each level takes exponentially more time to reach. Some skills are prerequisites for others. The clock ticks in real time, and it ticks even when you're not logged in: my capsuleer right now is training Industry to level 5, and it won't be fully baked for nearly four days. It doesn't matter whether I play a lot or not at all during that span: come Monday morning, my character will reap a four-percent boost to manufacturing time.

At first, I lamented that Eve didn't have a more Elder Scrolls-esque recognition for "getting better" by doing. Maybe it's the educator in me. But, then it dawned on me that Eve's closest relation in this regard isn't an RPG, but rather the turn-based strategy game Civilization. (Note, again: strategy games, unlike RPGs, don't care too much about characterization or storytelling.) Civilization doesn't have skills per se, but it does have a technology tree: you invest time in unlocking technologies, from the wheel to nuclear physics, with each technology leading to another. Like an RPG's and Eve's skills, Civilization's technology allow players to do stuff: fly, communicate, wage war, and foster commerce.

The skill queue has a neat mechanic without a parallel in Civilization: all skills in the queue must begin within 24 hours. I could line up 23 hours of quickie skills, and then one more that will take 26 days to train (e.g. Advanced Weapon Upgrades V, clocking in for me at 25 days, 19 hours and 50 minutes) -- but, until the time remaining dips below 24 hours again, I can't add anything more to the in-game queue. This is a nice preventative against, say, lining up a month's worth of skills, then returning to the game world as something of a badass (although lacking commensurate knowledge, something else I mentioned at the beginning and about which I'll write later).

No surprise, there are myriad third-party tools and apps that help players plan their skill queuing much further ahead then the 24-hour start-time requirement. I use Vitality and Aura. It's daunting to see that it will take 100 days to fulfill the remaining minimum skill requirements to fly a kind of über ship that caught my eye. But, it's also been nice to see the counter for piloting a new miner tick down to just three days. And, hey: while the clock ticks down for the big ship, I'll use that miner to harvest resources to start building smaller ships, or just harvesting ore to sell to pay for the big guy. One thing leads to the next.